THE 

DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 



MARIAN COX 




Class P S 3g Q S" 

Book__i23A^J] ? 

Ci)FMJIGRT DEPOSm 



BOOKS BY MARIAN COX 



The Crowds and the Veiled Women (novel) 
Spiritual Curiosities (short stories) 
Ventures in Worlds (essays) 
The Dry Rot of Society (essays) 



THE 

DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

AND 

OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 

MARIAN COX 

AUTHOR OF "the CROWDS AND THE VEILED WOMAN," "SPIRITUAL 

curiosities/' "ventures in worlds," etc. 



NEW YORK 

BRENTANO'S 

MCMXIX 






COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY MARIAN COX 



THE'PLIMPTON'PKESS 
NORWOOD«MASS-U-S/A 



'CI.A525683 



n^- 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Dry Rot of Society 9 

The Fools of Love 33 

The Lady in Wab 65 

The Gentleman in War 105 

The Great Fear in Germany 135 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

So Victory has ushered in another war 
over the fresh sod of the late war, the war 
of our best society against the drunkard. 

Society has had its fill of excitement, 
blood-letting and the ecstasy of conquest, 
and now we are prepared for the reaction 
into a dry, sober world of the prohibitory 
Virtues. 

If Thought, as the inspiration of man, 
did arise from the indigestion of an over- 
eating ape — as one evolutionist states — 
conscience developed as an after-thought 
along the same lines of our somatic ex- 
perience. Abstinence follows excess; the 
Puritan follows the debauchee. So glutted 
modernity is summoned to a state of stark 
self-consciousness amidst the wreckage of 
its exploded world, the sore self-conscious- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

ness full of index fingers which "ardent 
spirits," so called in Colonial days, seemed 
especially designed to enable man to escape. 
A Roman moralist wrote in the ancient 
De Tranquillitate that "The inventor of 
wine is called Liber because he frees the 
soul from care, releases it from slavery, 
quickens it, and makes it bolder for all 
undertakings." And to relieve the social 
tension in Rome that was caused by the 
Imperial City's excess of laws, Seneca rec- 
ommended an occasional drunkenness for 
the law-makers as well as for the citizens. 
We Americans are the inheritors of the 
Roman genius for law and order, and the 
ruling majority possess the temperament 
of Caesar's wife. But the Roman moralists 
provided the Saturnalia as a kind of of- 
ficial spree for the overburdened carya- 
tides of Home and State, which may 
account for the lasting soundness of the 
Roman virtues. 
CIO] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

In fact, all the ancient sages and rulers 
have recognized and provided for the or- 
giastic instinct in human nature in some 
form or other. Savage, Primitive and 
Mediaeval Authorities have all builded their 
worlds on order — with man's right to an 
occasional disorder. The classic orgies of 
pagan forests, the Greek orgeia and Roman 
Saturnalia and Christian Agapae, and the 
Fasching of the Middle Ages were all 
cunningly devised to purify society by 
means of an occasional spell of license. 
The autocrats of the past fancied that it 
made better subjects, workers, slaves, ma- 
trons, or Christians, to allow a complete 
change of conduct now and then and they 
adroitly steadied their masses for their 
daily bondage with a play in the forbidden 
fields, at appointed seasons. 

A Holy Day for the Unholiness of the 
people was the wise policy pursued by the 
ancient ecclesiastics and sovereigns who 

cm 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

regulated life on the belief that restraint 
strengthens but relaxation sweetens the 
nature of human beings. Thus to every- 
one was given his Day. The slaves were 
allowed to act as masters, the priests were 
allowed to blaspheme their Most High, the 
poor were allowed the luxuries of the rich, 
the women were allowed their full fling of 
hysterics, — everybody was allowed — 
even rnade — to express in the open all 
their secret dreams of power or delight, in 
dance, song, mirth, feast and drink, — be- 
cause of the ancient idea of the orgy's 
function to purify and preserve the stability 
of society. Well, we moderns have lost 
the rationale and right to the orgy since 
the Reformation; but we have evolved the 
cerebral orgies, distinctive of modern life, 
some of which Freud and his school have 
popularized as the ingrowing dream. 

Society is about to enter a new phase of 
social experimentation with human nature 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

in a nation of Teetotallers, beneath the 
stars and stripes. It is a logical outcome 
of the late war in its influence upon the 
American psychology. Our war with Ger- 
many stopped in a shock of peace just 
when we had tasted blood and gotten up our 
steam for the knock-out blow that never 
came. We are an adaptive, utilitarian 
people and were bound to find some use 
for all this sudden threatened waste on our 
hands, — of the War Morality, the Intel- 
ligence Bureau, the Espionage Act, etc., 
that covers the face of our Democracy. 
It was a magnificent inspiration of the law- 
makers to substitute anti-saloonism for anti- 
Germanism and to transform the man-hunt 
for the spy and the unnaturalized citizen into 
a man-hunt for the drunkard as the most 
dangerous alien in the new rule of Peace. 

The drunkard must go. It is an edict 
given in the grand manner of the Russian 

Czar when he pronounced his ukase against 

CIS] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Vodka, and diverted the viciousness of the 
moujik into another channel, the intem- 
perate desire to rule himself. The land of 
the Pilgrim Fathers is uniquely fitted for 
the attack upon the drunkard and the.^will 
of the people has been ratified for a world 
made safe for our Morality. The mid- 
Victorian morals could afford to tolerate 
the drunkard and to camouflage him as a 
gentleman, "as drunk as a lord," when 
found beneath the dinner table after the 
liqueurs were served; but our democratic 
virtues can scarcely afford to support the 
drunkard any longer, and society must be 
protected from the one who is a traitor to 
our civilization in so many ways. 

The social machinery, as well as the 
morale, has been perfected by the war for 
the detection and destruction of the drunk- 
ard. There are the internment camps all 
ready for him, and the jails fast emptying 
of their conscientious objectors, pacifists, 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

and dangerous aKens. The strongest point 
in favor of the Federal Law of Prohibition 
is that it will give an opportunity to the 
great War Bureaucracy to continue and 
increase its power and work. Therefore 
Prohibition may be a providential means 
of solving the Labor Problem which looms 
upon the horizon as one of the embarrassing 
results of the premature peace. Prohibi- 
tion will require a vast army of revenue 
officers, police and spies to enforce the law, 
thus providing employment for far more 
millions of people than are to be disem- 
ployed by the nation-wide edict. In some 
southern states where Prohibition is already 
being enforced, it is said that there is no 
longer any Labor Problem. It has caused 
a migration of the negroes to the north, 
and for the superior race, down there, it 
has supplied many new industries and 
sinecure desks. West Virginia is overrun 
with deputies endowed with an extraor- 

ni53 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

dinary Power of Search and Seizure: and 
Tennessee has devised extensive offices of 
*' state rangers" and "liquor deputies" 
whose sole business is that of watchful 
waiting for an infringement of the Law. 
Without a doubt, Prohibition is the es- 
sential step at this critical stage of our 
progress when society does not know 
whether it is crawling forwards or back- 
wards but is unpleasantly conscious of a 
redness, somewhere, which the optimists 
call a Blush and the pessimists call 
Bolshevism. 

So the Teetotaller becomes the new 
model for the reconstructionists of the 
dissipated old world. The Teetotaller em- 
bodies the popular virtue of renunciation. 
Everybody glorifies a renouncer, instinc- 
tively perceiving in the renouncement of 
the other fellow — whether of wine, women, 
his money or his life — a sweet making of 
room, a delicate compliment to the neigh- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

bor or the coming generation, a heau geste 
of surrender of a right for a duty, — the 
quaUty that is preservative of the species 
in peace times and in war makes con- 
scription unnecessary. Naturally, we, as 
traditional Puritans, love the renouncer of 
life, and in this divine moment of our 
thanksgiving for the accomplishment of 
our boys over there, we will express it by 
a national deification of the Teetotaller. 

The Teetotaller is a clean fighter who 
has never been accused of a bloodless 
pacifism even by the most abject or riotous 
of topers. The Teetotaller is always ready 
for a fight, and has the angels backing him 
with all their flashing swords. Carrie Na- 
tion hacked her way through the saloons 
with her little ax as one of the great build- 
ers of the nation, some day to be immor- 
talized in the American Hall of Fame, which 
refused a place to Edgar Allan Poe because 
he was a drunkard. And Billy Sunday, 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

the Saint Vitus of Morality, what a manly 
muscle he has for the D. T.'s of the world, 
and a rhetoric that bombards the masses 
into his brand of religion. 

In the New Social Order, to discover, to 
expose, and to catch the drunkard will 
soon become our patriotic duty as well as 
the fashionable hobby of both the sheep 
and the goats. ''Moonshiner" will be the 
cliche of conversation, exploited like "pro- 
German" by the moral sensationalists, 
eager for suspects. The recluse or the 
aristocrat who indulges in too much pri- 
vacy of Hfe will be liable to the ugly 
suspicion and rumors of a secret still; and 
only the frankest exposure of one's home- 
life and daily habits will be able to satisfy 
the new sleuths of democratized domes- 
ticity. Conceivably, one might be made 
to display a medical voucher of a house- 
hold's abstinence from alcohol, in the 
doorway of the home, replacing the Food 
CIS] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Administration's recent vouchers of a citi- 
zen's abstinence in another regard. Open- 
ness in the homehfe and steadiness on the 
streets will become the standard of con- 
duct, propriety and Americanization. The 
man who zigzags in his walk may receive 
the summary justice of the mob that was 
so well practised on the blond beasts of our 
recent furor; and the gentleman of the 
salon who gives himself away with a 
hiccough or an indecent cheer will be 
snubbed by everybody who is anybody 
with the expert snubs so recently visited 
upon the fool or knave who mouthed of 
Peace at the dinner table, before the 
armistice was declared. Best of all, the 
up-to-date American woman will find a 
new kind of culture for her Personality, 
a culture bound to suit these democratic 
times far better than woman's erstwhile 
culture of Beauty-parlors and exclusive 
Clubs. The popular woman must culti- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

vate henceforth her olfactory sense (the 
most rudimentary of the senses in woman) 
in order to be able to serve her Government 
and Morality as a breath-smeller. Man 
excels woman in the gustatory sense, and 
his sex is always chosen for the profession 
of tea-taster and wine-taster, but as a 
breath-smeller, it seems that the female 
should excel the male, because of the moral 
factor involved therein. 

No one will dare to speak a good word for 
the drunkard. No one will seek to fathom 
the profound secret of his being nor to 
explain to the shocked world his etiological 
peculiarities for fear that he or she, too, 
might be taken for a drunkard. "Help 
me — please help me up — out of the gut- 
ter ! " once pled a fallen roysterer to a bibu- 
lous passer-by in a less helpless state. "I 
can't help you up, old fellow, but I can lie 
down beside you!" replied the good Samari- 
tan of Vineyards. 
1:203 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

The drunkard is characterized by an 
exaggerated sociabiHty which may have 
something to do with the imperative at- 
traction of the bottle to him. He finds 
society indispensable to him in his quest 
of effect and is as ready as a homeless dog 
to make friends with every stranger. Al- 
most invariably, he is a good mixer, a 
boon companion, and a clubbable fellow, 
whose entire lack of snobbishness should 
commend him to the mercy of our Dem- 
ocracy, at least. The drunkard never sits 
in judgment upon his fellow men. His fault 
is an abject one, and he loves to condone 
"human nature" for its many failings, and 
seems free from all society's fears of the 
faux pas although a rank victim to the 
fear of loneliness which drives him to seek 
the gregarious warmth of people or of 
booze. The drunkard is an idealist who 
wants things different from what they are 
and he is striving in his way, curiously 

1:213 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

enough, to reform society and create a 
better world of men and women, living a 
hyperbolic englamoured life that carries 
out to the fullest extent all the socially 
damned instincts of the human race. Thus, 
like the Teetotaller, the drunkard is an 
idealist and an extremist, though the re- 
semblance stops there; for the drunkard 
drinks out of a profound humility of being, 
and the Teetotaller speaks out of the vain- 
glory of the faultily faultless. 

The drunkard is, also, like the German 
in being the victim of a false absolute that 
has perverted his emotion of the ideal. 
To the German the false absolute was 
Germany and he sought her glory beyond 
the frontiers of his national experience. 
But the false absolute of the drunkard is 
Life, and he seeks its glory beyond the 
frontiers of his personal experience in a 
divine debauch. He drinks to escape his 

own confines. He drinks with a mystic 
1:223 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

hankering that makes his toast Hke an un- 
utterable prayer that he may feel one with 
the gods for one glorious moment of their 
sun-soaked eternity. He drinks to escape 
himself and the sober, stone-eyed world 
which has hitched all his little stars to a 
treadmill, a petticoat or a plow. The 
drunkard could give to society profound 
reasons and excuses for drinking, if only 
he were gifted with the language of other 
worldness. It is the tragedy of the drunk- 
ard that he is too full for utterance, even 
when sober. 

Do the gods drink .^ The Greeks fancied 
so and peopled Olympus with a comely 
crew of high-livers, the memory of whose 
ambrosial feasts haunts our prohibited 
spirits for all time. The drunkard is 
assailed with this memory in the flesh, a 
kind of misplaced nostalgia for man's lost 
provinces of bliss. The most humble of 
mortals, he seeks to climb out of his dull 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

clod on a borrowed wing or a throb of the 
universe, whose heart is full of tears and 
flame. Sometimes it is simply his heart- 
ache that makes the drunkard long to drink 
and dream and find relief for his soul's 
muteness in a chaos of sound. 

It is true the drunkard sins against the 
social laws and against the Holy Ghost in 
himself, but it can scarcely be said against 
him that he sins also against natural law. 
Alas! Nature abets him in his shameful 
vice, and scientists say that alcohol is the 
mechanical energy of the sun which lit- 
erally soaks matter (makes an old souse of 
mother earth!) and creates a little moon- 
shiner out of nearly everything that grows. 
The drunkard can extract his fatal bev- 
erage from white blossoms or black peat; 
and the fruits of the orchard, the berries, 
the woods, the reeling fields of grain, all 
offer their wide-open bar of Bacchus to 
him in sunny defiance of every law that 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

society can enact. Yes, Nature must 
shoulder some of the guilt of the drunkard, 
for she is a universal distillery forever brew- 
ing her inexorable essence of delight and 
hurt for man and beast and has protected 
her immoral traJBfic by perpetuating in all 
that lives the appetite for the intoxica- 
tions of life. 

There is no solution of the problem of 
Prohibition whatsoever if we turn to nature 
for enlightenment. It would seem pos- 
sible to rid society of the drunkard by some 
process of oflScialized eugenics that would 
prevent him from mating and reserve the 
Teetotallers for the exclusive progenitors 
of the future race, if it were not for the 
amazing fact that the ancestry of the 
drunkard is commonly found to consist of 
Teetotallers of the strictest order. The pro- 
verbial son of the clergyman, for instance, 
serves as an illustration of some strange 
law of nature which demands that the in- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

hibited parents shall be betrayed by their 
contrary offspring. Nature abhors a 
vacuum, indeed, and the things man slays 
in one generation will spring from their 
graves in the next. 

Man has been defined as the only animal 
who makes love at all seasons and who 
drinks when he is not thirsty. The re- 
mark of some wily Puritan who would 
glorify the inferior animal in his desire to 
degrade the human. For all through the 
animal creation we can discover the same 
old intoxication impulse, subject only to 
the control or cultivation of the creature's 
will. Naturalists relate that insects are 
frequently intoxicated by indulgence in 
over-ripe fruit juices; elephants and dogs 
and even that paragon of domesticity, the 
barnyard hen, have been found to possess 
a natural alcoholic taste capable of an ab- 
normal development. And the gentle cow 

— the Madonna of Mammals ! — suc- 
1:263 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

cumbs to temptation in the windfall season, 
when the ground is spread for her feast of 
the fatal apple. The bovine spree is called 
"an apple drunk" by farmers, and the 
Agricultural Colleges give instructions on 
how to treat and cure the fallen creature 
at this time in order to keep her milk pure 
rather than her morals. 

Since it is undeniable that Nature is in 
cahoots with the drunkard, and since the 
drunkard may be the natural man in ex- 
celsis, after all, it is just as well for us to try 
and get his point of view before the great ex- 
termination begins ; and his best apologia has 
been written by Baudelaire, who just missed 
being a drunkard by becoming a poet. 

**One must ever be drunken," says 
Baudelaire. ** Everything is in that; it is 
the only question. In order not to feel the 
horrible burden of time that is breaking 
your shoulders, bending you earthwards, 
you must be ceaselessly drunken. But 

1:27] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

with what? With wine, poetry, or virtue, 
as you will — only intoxicate yourself; and 
if sometimes on the steps of a palace or 
the greensward of a grave, or in the mourn- 
ful solitude of your room, you wake to find 
the intoxication diminished or vanished, 
ask of the wind or the wave or the star or 
the bird or the clock or all that flies, all 
that groans, all that rolls on, all that sings, 
all that speaks, ask what time it is, and 
wind, wave, star, bird and clock will tell 
you, "It is time to be drunken! Lest you 
should be the martyred slave of time, be 
ceaselessly drunken! With wine, poetry 
or virtue, as you will!" 

All the poets from Anacreon and Omar 
Khayyam to Kipling have chanted the 
same wild paeon to Nature as the old hag 
who deals in youth, beauty, and all the in- 
toxications. But Baudelaire has been 
unique in his mention of Virtue as one of 
man's means of transport on a jag. 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Can Virtue intoxicate? 

If so, the patriautocrats of Prohibition 
and Democracy should be made to reaHze 
the fact and to incorporate it in a Law for 
the regulation and control of the virtues 
against the dangers and follies of excess. 

Wine, poetry, and virtue ! Surely a little 
of each is good, though a great deal may 
carry the imbiber to the padded walls or 
moral crusades of society. Virtue as a 
savour to the spirit acts as a preservative 
of tone and color, like alcohol, but an ex- 
cess of virtue corrupts and destroys like 
the vice of dipsomania. Even self-sacrifice, 
the supreme virtue in our morality of war 
or peace today, carried to excess becomes a 
statutory offense, suicide. 

The Moralist, the Prohibitionist and the 
Christian can find their license for a spiri- 
tual intoxication in the Scriptural injunc- 
tion, "Be not drunk with wine but be filled 
with the Spirit." But the Divine Guest 

1:293 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

of the world, who turned water into wine 
at the wedding of Canaan, castigated self- 
righteousness as the spirit of evil in man- 
kind; and Carlyle complicates man's moral 
problem still further beyond solution with 
his pronunciamento that the worst fault 
in a man is to be conscious of none. 



CSC] 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

Talleyrand's love-affair with Madam 
de Stael ended with the great cynic's dec- 
laration that ''one must have loved a 
woman of genius in order to appreciate 
the happiness of loving a fool." Later 
when asked how a man of his mentality- 
could love such a pasha's toy as Madam 
Grand, the future Madam Talleyrand, he 
replied: ''Elle me repose,*' 

The woman fool still wears her paper 
crown as the queen lover and breeder of 
the human race. As an object of selec- 
tion in love and marriage, her popularity 
has been so great that it surely can be 
called to account for the paucity of genius 
in the female sex. The woman of genius 
has been unfavored by man because looked 
upon as a sport of the species full of danger- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

ous potentials of the epicene. A world of 
the Epicene! How many have shuddered 
at the possibility when confronted by the 
new woman as a human being with brains! 
The anti-Feminists and anti-Malthusians, 
the Rousseaus and Don Juans and Na- 
poleons and Popes and Obstetricians of 
every age, — those who have had sincerely 
at heart the procreation of the human race, 
— have sought to achieve its highest po- 
tency by glorification of the woman fool, 
and of Love, as her monopoly of emo- 
tionalism. 

Love, exploited thus as the business for 
a specialized sex, has finally become a kind 
of genius common to all women. The sex 
so often arraigned for its lack of genius in 
the intellectual forms finds undisputed its 
possession of a genius for love. Genius, 
with its dreams, its transports, its egoism 
and personalness, its power of oblivion to 

the rest of the world, its orgies of self- 
1:343 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

sacrifice and human victims upon Altars, 
its passion for surrender to something or 
other, divine or demonic, that will imbue 
with inspiration and creativeness the inner 
emptiness, — this is the emotional genius 
of woman today. 

The gospel of love spread among a sex 
for the needs of militarism and the labor 
market has filled woman with the spiritual 
hysteria of apostleship. 

Generalizations about the sexes have 
become popularized as our daily proof of 
a free-press. To be modern is to have 
one's ideas doctrinated by the school of 
Bernard Shaw, Freud, or Ellen Key. It 
seems that everything has been said at 
last about love and the sexes that could be 
said with immunity from the law; and yet 
there remain a few unworn generalizations 
to be made upon the age-old theme. For 
instance, it is not a commonplace of lit- 
erature nor social comment to note the 

1:353 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

unpopular but pregnant truth, that the 
great psychological difference in the sexes 
issues solely from their opposite culture of 
love. 

Man has been subjected exclusively to 
the culture of war: woman, exclusively to 
the culture of love. A fairly platitudinous 
observation to make at this time, although 
we are only now awakening to the realiza- 
tion that war is, as Norman Angell calls it, 
the Great Illusion, and that in this world's 
illusion man has been cultured into his 
special kind of utilitarian virtues. 

Similarly, woman has had Love presented 
to her as the Great Illusion of woman's 
world, for whose service she has been 
cultured into her special kind of utilitarian 
virtues. 

The objective served by man's training 

in the illusion of war has been death, his 

own death voluntarily incurred as man's 

supreme duty and glory on earth; and the 
11363 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

objective served by woman's training in 
the Great Illusion of love has been life, her 
own life-giving, as woman's supreme duty 
and glory on earth. Thus, one can say that 
as faith in war has achieved the martyr- 
dom of man, so faith in love has achieved 
the martyrdom of woman. 

Woman has been trained to stake her all 
upon love, to dream and plan and wait and 
focus life's Multitudinousness upon love's 
little glamour. And the inquiry is as 
pertinent now as ever before to ask is 
such a policy of life propitious to woman's 
happiness or evolution .^^ Or, if one may 
not be allowed to take such a pagan view 
of woman's destiny, to ask is it essential to 
the happiness or evolution of man? 

Once La Rochefoucauld classified love, 

romantic passionate love, as being ''akin 

to ghosts of which every one speaks but no 

one has ever seen." 

Although love is the burden of our song 

1:373 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

in all that appeals to the imagination, 
poetry, art, music, religion and drama, 
certain stringencies in civilization have so 
conditioned the love-life of humanity that 
the words of La Rochefoucauld find their 
corroboration in the vast generality of 
human lives today. 

To be romantic is to be fated to disaster; 
to love is a tragedy of waste; to be loved a 
comedy of anachronism. Therefore it 
seems fortunate that love in the common 
experience of common humanity rarely 
figures as a reality. 

Love has become but a dream and desire 
in minds free to dream and desire the un- 
attainable. Love has become the great 
make-believe of adult play. Love is an 
imaginary pirouette amidst the lock-steps 
of realities. Love is a luxuriating in the 
racial cradle of temperament. Love is a 
cunning dipsomania carried about in public 

like the black bottle hugged beneath an 
CSS] 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

old lady's shawl. Love is many things, 
and plays strange roles in the mind of 
humanity today; and for the indulgence of 
its delicate emotit)nal calisthenics man has 
provided the theater and books and many 
other brilliant exploitations of lucrative 
fiction. 

But love rarely comes as a reality even 
to her who is wholly consecrated to it, the 
so-called womanly woman, seeking ever in 
destiny the crown of love. She finds man 
a gamester of love playing the game of sex 
with the loaded dice of his license, or finds 
man too sane for the romantic dream of 
love, too self-fulfilled for its childest my- 
thologies of passion. 

Love, as woman has been made to think 
of it, belongs only to the realms of the trans- 
cendental or the pathological, and man as 
lover or husband caii only disillusion, dis- 
appoint or wound her. Yet the wish has 

grown so strong that no individual dis- 

1:393 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

enchantment can break its spell; and 
woman pursues her quest endlessly, whether 
as maid, wife or widow, the quest for the 
divine mate for her ever mateless being. 

Once the Italian Manzoni was asked why 
he cut out all the love scenes from his 
novels. He replied: "Because I am of the 
opinion that one must not speak of love in 
a way to lead others to that passion. 
What we call love I think that I figure very 
moderately when I say that there is six hun- 
dred times more of it than is necessary for 
the preservation of our honorable species." 
Manzoni stands alone among his fellow 
craftsmen of fiction in his scorn of romantic 
love, as a pernicious overcultivation, and 
his belief in the necessity to cultivate the 
unromantic kind of love, love of humanity, 
in the hearts of modern men and women. 
Romantic love is narrow, selfish, and as 
prolific of the evil passions of hate, cruelty, 

jealousy and cupidity, the cupidity of pos- 
1:403 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

sessing another's body and soul, as of the 
noble passions of self-sacrifice and service. 
Whereas the love of humanity brings only 
the noble passions, pity, — chivalry, service 
and self-sacrifice, — and has no baser metal. 

But woman has been subjected to the 
invidious culture of romantic love, therefore 
all love has become for her myth or fata 
morgana, leading her on to her mental, 
moral, or social damnation. 

Until woman emancipates herself from 
the illusion, ay, the obsession of love, no 
other power or suffrage on earth can liber- 
ate her mind from its age-old thraldom of 
the personal and petty. Her growth has 
been warped by her education in the over- 
valuation of the love-life and of man. 

The fine sense of valuation, proportion, 
and humor is the gift of knowledge and 
experience to the winnowed personality. 
By the acrid test of such a criteria, love, as 
the life-force, is made to assume its proper 

1:413 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

subordination in one's thought and scheme 
of Hving. Man's superiority to woman as 
a master of Kfe and thought resides in his 
possession of this criteria. 

Man rids himself of the illusion of love 
by freedom in its experience. Man rids 
himself of the urge to the romance of sex 
in the romance of the world's great ad- 
ventures. Man tests the love-life in the 
balance with the communal pressure upon 
him, and so finds its lightness. Man rids 
himself of love's obsession by succumbing 
to love's temptations. He becomes the 
abstainer through excess, and the healthy 
moralist through knowing the unhealthi- 
ness of immorality. Civilization has solved 
the sex problem for the male in licensing 
him to solve it for himself. Hence love to 
a man means but a casual reminder of our 
common human origin, to be used dis- 
creetly as a home-dose, a sort of salutary 
euphoria to quiet the nerves, or as an out- 

1:42] 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

of-doors tonic, a temperamental spree, re- 
current, amusing, laughable even, but 
unmentionable . 

Of all the mysteries of man's mind to 
woman, this is the greatest: man's attitude 
of casualness or caddishness to the love-life. 
For woman, denied the knowledge and ex- 
perience of most of the sanifying realities 
of life, has lived in a subjective world of 
erotic make-believe. Therefore when a 
woman loves it is without any of the regu- 
lative sense of valuation, proportion and 
humor possessed by man, so that she is 
apt to become the pieuse of love, a de- 
bauchee of the spiritual vita sexualis, whose 
mystic capers in the senses, and freak 
cerebration about Creed, make her appear, 
sooner or later, as a fool, a bore, or a trouble- 
some puzzle to the man she loves. 

In accomplishing this culture of woman 

in love, there has been employed certain 

methods practiced by the psychologists of 

1:433 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

ecclesiasticism for the transmutation of 
human emotions. By this time most of us 
know of that paradox of instinct, self- 
sacrifice and self-preservation, in the sex- 
complex of human psychology. In the 
light of this, one understands how the re- 
pression of sex excites the expression of 
self-sacrifice in the nature of a human 
being, and the gratification of sex opposes 
the development of those qualities which 
rest upon the entrenched value of self- 
sacrifice in religious and social systems. 
Thus through repressions, austerities and 
denials of the will-to-live the ecclesiastics 
procured their fanatics, devotees and self- 
immolators upon the altar of the Church. 
And thus too, through repressions, chastity, 
bans and denials of the will-to-live, woman 
has been made religious in her human love. 
Woman in love instinctively longs to 
sacrifice and devote herself, to make a 

ritual of a kiss, and a life-long beatitude 
1:443 



THEFOOLS OF LOVE 

of a clasp. Even the sufiFerings of love 
have come to form part of its morbid at- 
traction to her. She revels in the fastings, 
scourgings, confessions, forgiveness of sins, 
penances, ceremonials, communions and 
symbolism of flesh and spirit in the Or- 
thodoxy of human passion. She finds her 
refinement of pleasure in the egoism and 
mysticism of the passion which the whole- 
some mind of the male lover endures only 
for his woman's sake and would preserve 
only as the magic for his Titania's eyes. 

And when fate frustrates her love, a 
woman's sacrificial sexual sense is so pro- 
foundly stirred that she turns to suicide 
with a facility strange in the sex remarked 
for its rarity of suicide in comparison to 
the suicides of men. Woman's suicides are 
all caused by love, with the rarest excep- 
tions. Man's suicides, so much more com- 
mon, are, as invariably, caused by the loss 

of money or health. The suicidal impulse 

1:453 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

is confused with the love-impulse in a 
woman's nature, but as her lot supplies 
her with innumerable modes of acting out 
her suicidal impulse in temperamental, im- 
material ways, the impulse does not often 
express itself in the mere physical act of 
self-destruction, though woman is the self- 
destroyer sui generis. Suttee in India was 
abolished with the greatest difficulty, owing 
to woman's, not man's, clinging to the 
custom. 

Our own marriage customs, it seems, 
have provided subtle gratifications for 
woman's suicidal impulse in love, in mak- 
ing her give up her name, fortune, identity 
and selfhood in a myriad of ways, when 
she marries; and she has elaborated upon 
the traditional sacrifices by finding many 
other things to surrender when she marries. 
The musician generally gives up her music 
*'just because" she marries, the artist, her 

painting, and so on. Woman's everyday 
[463 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

suicides of body or brain, for the sake of 
love, her self-oblations upon altars of hu- 
man relationships, in which she gives all 
for nothing like a rapt saint, — results 
from that transcendental abjectness of her 
innermost being — which is the psycho- 
logical state of creatures that are leading 
an unnatural life; the cloistered, the sac- 
rosanct or the hallucinated. 

The conduct peculiar to woman at every 
stage of her existence upon the globe can 
be explained by the one thing: her love 
of man. In many ways it seems as if to 
love were the exclusive prerogative of the 
female sex, the biological imperative of the 
feminine being alone. For in spite of 
nature's penalty of burden and pain for 
the female in love, and in spite of society's 
edicts and penalties of loss of substance or 
character for the female in love, woman has 
continued to live only for love and to give 

all for love, like a creature devoid of every 

1:473 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

vestige of the self -preservative instinct, like a 
little animal demented with some strange 
insanity of the soul. 

For man's love woman has paid every 
price exacted from body, brain, or soul. 
She has mated and has bred according to 
the laws laid down for her by man. She 
has accepted her state of love or maternity 
as dishonored when man has pronounced 
it dishonored or as glorified when man has 
pronounced it glorified. For the sake of 
love she has posed as soulless when man 
fancied the soulless woman, as brainless 
when man courted the brainless woman, 
and, in living up to his varying ideals, has 
even feigned to be without the vitals of 
humanity, as when man admired, and 
made the proper thing in morals and 
manners, the virgin-mother, the passive 
passionless female, and the fainting lady. 

One might think the preservation of the 
species sufficiently guaranteed by the blind 
1:483 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

incorrigibility of the child-bearing sex 
towards love and mating as established by 
the length of human history; and yet 
civilization has added every artificial in- 
citement to the biological imperative of 
the feminine being. Woman's livelihood, 
place, power, name, et cetera, — her whole 
world of values, in fact, — has been made to 
depend upon her possession of mere man, 
as though to create in woman's nature, 
by every power and artifice, a frenzy of 
Anthropolatry and Andromania. 

The female's emotional culture has ended 
in making it more essential, as a fulfillment 
of her nature, to love than to be loved. 
Another reversion of the pristine roles. 
Without either an object, reciprocity, or 
opportunity for her loving, woman seems 
able to sustain all the dynamics of love in 
her spirit and thought: a phenomenon 
which can only be explained by the modern 
aphrodisiacal atmosphere that never per- 
il 49] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

mits a woman to forget the englamoured 
origin of the human race. 

Woman's contemporary license for leisure 
makes her the chief victim of the veiled 
play of the arts upon the passion. Man, 
the drab-worker preoccupied by the mastery 
of environment, has left woman to become 
the loafer and inviter of her soul. She is 
the matinee-fiend, movie-fan, music-lover, 
magazine-supplement-reader, poetry-dab- 
bler, tango-dancer, tea-monger and scan- 
dal-scenter in society. Fashionable society, 
whose favorite diversion has always been 
the blood-hounding of the culprits of 
love! This daily wallowing of woman in a 
subjective sensationalism has pampered her 
appetite for emotions until it is virtually 
impossible to discover a woman of our 
best society who has any ambition in life 
save a vague one for those ultimates of 
emotion and sensation said to exist in a 
grande passion of love. 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

Woman has thought about love so much 
that it has given her gout of the brain. 
She has indulged her sentimentality about 
love with such excess that it has given her 
fatty degeneration of the heart. Love has 
become woman's Olympian madness, her 
sublimated folly, her voluptuousness of 
self-destruction, — and now that the mod- 
ern male in the vast majority has become 
scarce, ineligible, unattractive or celibate, 
her lonely pursuit has become something 
febrile and neurasthenic and full of desolate 
ardors like a seeking for God. 

Already woman as pursuer and wooer of 
man has become conventionalized as one of 
the signs of the times in Shavian and other 
realistic fiction. 

Man's increasing emancipation from love 
and woman has forced a large number of 
women into the business world and pro- 
duced that much-discussed curiosity, the 
economically independent woman. But 

1512 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

when in the business world, woman per- 
forms her work there as one would serve a 
term under duress, with the secret proviso 
of abandoning it the moment she jBnds 
"love" upon which to plant the remainder 
of her existence. According to the dream 
and desire, love grants to woman a magna- 
charta of do-nothingness, a nirvana of the 
inert; so that one longs for it most in- 
tensely when one gets the sense of oneself 
as tired, driven, or misplaced. 

In the existence of the well-to-do maidens 
and matrons, love acts with a different im- 
perative. To them love means simply 
adventure, thrills, excitement and danger. 
And this is an atmosphere so congenial to 
the high-strung American woman that, 
once having lived in it, she is forever pos- 
sessed by its nostalgia. It becomes the 
dark flower, the haunting sweetness of her 
bouquetless days. It drives her into her 

whirl of senseless activities and gives a 
1:523 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

reason for her endless self-bedizenment, 
self -culture, and self-advertisement, and for 
her amazing waste of life in the social game 
of meeting people. ^'To meet people" — 
that appears to be the grand and total 
object of a society woman's life. She en- 
dures boredom unspeakable in what seems 
the meaningless process of meeting people, 
new people, more people, the world of ir- 
relevant people at teas, receptions, dinners, 
lectures, — the little Mandarin! — so rest- 
less and insatiable in her subliminal quest 
for the One, glorified male, who is imbued 
with the power to emparadise the blanks 
of a woman's existence and to uplift her 
soul from the sodden to the winged. 

In the doting faith that a man can be- 
come an object for a life-long exercise of 
emotionalism, all types and classes of 
women, in all sorts and kinds of ways, 
have made their art the pursuit of the male, 
the busy elusive self-contained male, del- 

15S2 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

uged with invitations "to meet people" in 
meaningless congregations, deluged with 
offers of exotic cultivations of emotion in 
the slip-knot ties of platonic friendships, 
soul-mates or light-o'-loves, from that arch- 
donor and vendor of self, woman. 

Haeckel once said that the severest 
shock a human constitution could stand 
was to discover one's own uselessness. This 
shock is coming to many women today. It 
is responsible for the exaggerated popu- 
larity of Feminism and Red Cross Nursing, 
for woman's belated schools of Culture 
and her other variety of attempts to justify 
her existence by new intellectual or phil- 
anthropic feats. The uselessness of her 
loving feat is becoming more and more clear 
to the enlightened woman. The child has 
outgrown it, as once directed upon him, 
the episodic child whom it has become un- 
hygienic to kiss. And man no longer de- 
sires, admires nor needs it directed upon 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

him. The fainting lady of mid- Victorian 
days was evolved by masculine taste, and 
she was as surely cured of her fainting feat 
by a change in masculine taste. The lov- 
ing woman of the twentieth century re- 
sembles her fainting sister of former times 
in being an over-engined supply to a limited 
demand of man. 

Love was once nature's great missionary. 
It served as a means of understanding and 
reconciliation between the sexes. Love was 
once a sort of Esperanto of the senses which 
enabled two mute foreigners to become in- 
telligible to each other. But that was be- 
fore the comradship of the sexes was 
evolved as one of the graces of our civiUza- 
tion. Nowadays a man and woman find 
each other in friendship and lose each 
other in love. The love nature so dif- 
ferently cultivated in the sexes has finally 
made of love their chief source of mis- 
understanding, disillusion and enmity. 

1552 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Love makes its votaries wretched beings 
whose souls are not within their own keep- 
ing. Therefore man demands to be free 
to love in order to become cured of love 
and woman demands to be free to love in 
order to live for love: and herein the 
calamitous disparity. 

Man's derision of the epicene, his 
antipathy to the sexless, his fears of the 
"unwomanly," in their possibilities of de- 
velopment in the female, would lead one to 
suppose that a man's personal welfare 
and happiness wholly depended upon the 
love of a woman being freely and fully 
bestowed and concentrated upon him. If 
that has ever been the case with the old- 
fashioned male, it is far from being the 
case today. The first wisdom a woman 
gains from a love-affair is that the quickest 
and surest way to lose a lover is to love him 
the way he longs to be loved. Love is the 

one thing no normal man really wants 
1:563 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

from a woman. He wants her consent 
and loyalty to his love or passion, but her 
own love-passion terrifies and drives him 
away as though with some atavie memory 
of the female's erotic anthropophagy. 
Something in the deepest recesses of man's 
being still remembers, shudderingly, the 
embrace of the female spider. 

"Horrible angel of devotion," once mur- 
mured the much tried Heine to the minis- 
tration of his loving Matilde. The penalty 
of life-long marriage and support upon the 
chainless lightning of love, the sordid capi- 
tahzing of love in Law, breach-of -promise 
suits and divorce, with their public ex- 
posures of the intimacies of love and mar- 
riage, — have inspired the modern male 
with a canny prejudice against the special- 
ized emotions of woman. Love has even 
appeared in the Courts of 1916 as a plea 
of man in justification of his increasing 
crime of wife-desertion. One William 

n573 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Custer, of New Haven, Conn, arrested at 
South River, N. Y., a few months ago, on 
the charge of deserting his wife, plead ef- 
fectively in court that his wife was ''loving 
him to death." There must be many 
subtle and complex causes, psychologic, 
social and economic, for the evident and 
growing objection of the male to becoming 
the recipient of a woman's grande passion. 
The only types of manhood who honestly 
hanker for the experience are: the ado- 
lescent, the paranoic and the unlovable. 
Take the ordinary seasoned male person, 
especially when uncommonly attractive or 
distinguished, and it will be found that he 
is so closely pursued by the ubiquitous 
Anthropolatress or Aphrodisiac, that sooner 
or later, there is aroused in his nature the 
horror feminae of decadents, sages, and 
priests. 

When Talleyrand turned from Madam 

de Stael to find happiness in the love of 
i:583 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

the fool, he was doubtless inspired by the 
desire to escape from being loved with the 
grande passion of the woman of genius. 
For after all, love is but the smallest con- 
centration of the biggest forces of the 
personality, — imagination, aspiration, 
ideality, making love's poetry of the senses; 
therefore the more dynamic the intellect 
the more highly sexed the nature of man 
or woman. The Sapphos and the Heloises 
of every age, the women of genius and of 
the highest culture of their time, have 
gone down in history as famed for their 
unhappy fates as the grande amoureuse 
as for their achievements in the world's 
work. 

''There is in me," said George Sand, 
"nothing strong save the need of loving." 
George Ehot, of whom it was said that 
her man's intellect had unsexed her, con- 
fessed herself as being a creature wholly 

dependent upon the affections, "needing 

1:593 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

upholding, encouraging, petting, comfort- 
ing, all the time." Sonia Kavalesky, a 
woman scientist who was awarded the 
Bordin prize of the Academy of Sciences in 
France, and for whom was predicted a 
career of invaluable contributions to science, 
died while still in her youth of "a broken 
heart." The dying words of this woman of 
genius, who had achieved success and fame 
in her work and a foremost place in the 
world, were a lament that she had "had 
everything in life except the one thing 
needful — love!" A few years ago the 
love-affair of Madam Curie, acclaimed the 
greatest genius of her sex, and Professor 
Langevan stirred the public of two con- 
tinents with a scandalized incredulity. 
Mary Wallstonecraft, called the man-hater 
because of her prehistoric principles of 
feminism, was wrecked in mind and body 
by her hapless passion for the philanderer 
Imlay as completely as any little Midenette 



THE FOOLS OF LOVE 

who loves not wisely but too well. Julie 
de Lespinesse affords another example of 
intemperate womanliness. Dowered with 
every gift of mind and social power and 
with a personality that could make ''marble 
feel and matter think," this famed Ma- 
demoiselle valued herself so cheaply that 
she left nothing to the world except a few 
pathetic love-letters to the coxcomb who 
had broken her heart. 

America has produced notably few women 
of distinction in letters and the arts, but 
among the few there is Margaret Fuller, 
woman-genius and illustrious failure, who 
admitted her longings for love as being 
above all her intellectual ambitions and 
uttered the wail so reminiscent of the 
interminable wails of Marie Bashkirtseff 
for the divine passion: "I shall always 
reign through the intellect. But the 
life! Oh, my God! Shall that never be 
sweet!" 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Life and literature are teeming with 
just such instances; which one might cite 
ad infinitum, revelatory of the super-lov- 
ingness of the super- woman who is thus, 
after all, but the super-fool. 



im:i 



THE LADY IN WAR 



THE LADY IN WAR 

"War time is the opportunity of fools," 
says Lord Courtney of Penwith, without 
an arriere pensee, however, of its appKca- 
tion to the sex chiefly notable in history 
for its feats of reproduction. Through the 
catastrophe of war, the women have plunged 
to the great opportunity of their mundane 
existence. 

Like some monster from forgotten ages, 
the war-machine has crept upon a careless, 
egocentric world, but the strange, secret 
nature of woman was prepared to welcome 
it. Without woman's readiness to sacri- 
fice and serve, the god of war could not 
have cradled itself in the heart of modernity 
and demanded the old ritualism of flesh 

and blood to its glory of might. 

1:65] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

On the banks of the Ganges, rehgion 
dawned in the breasts of the mothers who 
threw their babes, rapturously, beneath 
the wheels of Juggernaut to be crushed in 
the death then deemed glorious by the 
worshipers of force. Today it is the war- 
machine to whom they give their young 
to be destroyed; and, characteristically, 
woman still seeks the chic in her abandon, 
and gives the life of son, brother or husband 
with the same old devotion to human sacri- 
fice that inspired her beside the sacred 
river of India. Thus the pageantry of 
death goes on and on, englamoured with the 
flowers and songs and smiles of women. 

The greatest surprise of the war has 
been woman's attitude and preparedness 
for its prosecution. At the outbreak, it 
was naively believed by many that the 
women of the world would somehow manage 
to circumvent the carnage, to outwit the 
commanders, and to find the way to save 

nee] 



THE LADY IN WAR 

the men from their doom of a false civiUza- 
tion. Even the feminists shared the gen- 
eral confidence in woman's traditional cun- 
ning and unscrupulousness as a probable 
means of extrication from the world- 
dilemma — caused by an excess of mascu- 
line Honor. Without the obsessions of 
honor, justice, and military glory, that have 
beset the dreams of man, woman appeared 
to be the destined one to make the world 
safe for contemporaneity. 

But the war has destroyed that illusion, 
at least. 

The war has flayed humanity and torn 
off the masks, and the female of the species 
is revealed as more deadly than the male, 
in reality as in Kiplingese. 

When the hour of fate struck for man, 
the women of every nation sprang to the 
arms of Moloch, with a mystic unity, like 
full-grown soldiery from Cadmus-teeth in- 
visibly sown throughout the mellowed earth. 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

The war has given the sex an esprit de 
corps once considered impossible to achieve 
among its fair members. The culture of 
monarchy and democracy has resulted alike 
in producing the same psychology in the 
women of the different breeds; for every- 
where in Europe and America the women 
have shown themselves to be ready, or- 
ganized and equipped for the war-work of 
factory, hospital or battle, with a unan- 
imous passion the sex has never possessed 
for any other cause. 

Thus it is necessary to reconstruct our 
ideal of woman. 

Obviously, woman is not the congenital 
pacifist and lover and savior of life that 
man has assumed her to be through 
mediaeval and modern times. Under the 
blithe suavity of the feminine there lurk the 
fires of rancor, hate and violence, more dan- 
gerous than the hostilities of man for man be- 
cause undirected, unglorified, and unsung. 



THE LADY IN WAR 

There is a strange something, a root of 
unreason, a streak of crazed force, Hke the 
errata of Nature herself, which exists in- 
vincibly in the feminine soul. It has made 
poets in despair call woman the sphinx 
without a secret; it has induced psycholo- 
gists to probe in her being for the complex 
of the subconscious, and it has justified 
scientists in their statement that the brain 
of woman "is always threatened with dan- 
ger from the reverberations of her physio- 
logical emergencies." 

Every woman possesses the profound 

knowledge of these facts, and though it 

may not often injure her self-conceit, it 

always makes her despise or distrust her 

own kind. It is a hoary truism that no 

woman ever really likes another woman, 

and in their associations inspired by worldly 

vanity, each woman seeks a refuge from 

other women as the unconquerable snob. 

It requires militarism or effeminization to 

11693 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

make a snob of a man; but every woman is 
born with the compact soul of a snob, and 
seeks instinctively any source of power with 
which she can express her true nature, im- 
perialistically, in snubs and display. 

A false idealism is responsible for all the 
misspilt blood that stains the pages of 
history. Therefore in the reconstruction 
period soon to face us, let us not err again 
by recoil from truth. 

Woman must be idealized as a belliger- 
ent for, in her militancy as a noncombatant, 
she has become ridiculous. Already she 
has gained some of the gallantry and pres- 
tige of man upon the battlefields of Europe. 
Russia's Battalion of Death, and the regi- 
ments of women in Serbia and Japan, have 
fired the women of the world into the morale 
that but awaits its call to the front. 

In America — known as the land of the 
female ennobled by the male — this fever 
of war is seen at its maximum. Civilian 



THE LADY IN WAR 

life fails to curb woman's impatient ardor 
for the big business of war; and day and 
night, upon the streets, we see the passing 
troops of women — the light infantry and 
veteran reserves — marching to the cheers 
of the populace that once were given only 
to queens and the corps of men. The shop- 
windows wink and tempt with woman's 
becoming insignia of war, the modish regi- 
mentals and immaculate veil that mark 
the new sisterhood of rich and poor. The 
ubiquitous female — at last redeemed from 
the charge of man-hunting — roams at 
large in her new-found freedom of war, 
the chip of patriotism for her epaulet, and 
so eager for the fray that, with her wild 
scent for the pro-German, she threatens to 
destroy the peace of every community of 
interests alien to her own. 

As an evocatrix of war, the knitting 
woman has also made her appearance upon 
the American scene; and is, perhaps, the 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

most conspicuous of the popular types. 
We can trace her descent from the knitting 
woman of France who domesticated the 
Reign of Terror with her industrious pres- 
ence. Dickens describes the knitting 
women of that bloody day, picturesquely, 
in their public gatherings and sedulous at- 
tendance in the zone of the guillotine, 
knitting and knitting, and busily counting 
the heads that fell. At that time, the 
knitting women were after the heads of 
the aristocrats, and today they are after 
the heads of the ''pacifists," and other 
blasphemers of the godhead of war. 

Woman as an embodied Day of Judge- 
ment is dangerous indeed, for since the 
time of the discovery of original sin, she 
has regarded every other woman as a spy, 
a suspect, or a guilty one, until her innocence 
or rather her chastity is proven. 

After war was declared by America, one 

of the first exploits of the women was to 
1:723 



THE LADY IN WAR 

form a patriotic organization, with oflSces 
in New York, whose object was to secure 
the thumb-prints of every American in the 
U. S. A. Until the war, thumb-prints be- 
longed rather exclusively to Rogues' Gal- 
leries and were of use only to the Police. 
But the incident reveals woman's first 
instinctive attitude to the citizens of the 
threatened Union. Today no American 
citizen is safe from woman in her passion- 
ate patrioteering and policing of the nation. 
Almost daily one reads in the papers of 
a charge, an arrest or an assault made by 
some vigilant one of the sex upon the un- 
wary in pubUc. The Public follows the 
grande dame in worship of etiquette in war, 
and has established an imperative ^punctilio 
that compels a citizen to arise, uncover his 
head and look as though chcking his heels 
together the instant one of the popular 
anthems begins to play — even though he be 

deaf, or blind, or inhibited by shell-shock. 

1:733 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

An incident occurred, a short time ago, 
which affords a good example of the kind 
of activities that replete the news columns 
and police courts in this strange day. A 
young lady, at tea at a fashionable hotel 
of the Metropolis, observed a stranger at 
a table nearby who did not remove his hat 
from his head at the psychological moment 
of the band's playing of the national 
anthem. The patriotic damsel promptly 
arose and knocked off the man's hat, and 
the man, being neither a pacifist nor a pro- 
German, had the temerity to strike back 
at the lady, a scufHe ensuing which ended 
in Court with the dismissal of the case 
because of the lady's red-blooded patriot- 
ism and the man's duly proven bona-fide 
Americanism. 

As if to show the new woman's freedom 

from all sex-prejudice, the incident has 

been followed by the announcement in the 

press of a resolution passed by the Woman's 
1:743 



THE LADY IN WAR 

Relief Corps in Connecticut, demanding 
that women shall remove their hats as well 
as men whenever the national anthem is 
sung or played; and the resolution has been 
endorsed by women's patriotic organiza- 
tions of other states and is expected to be 
made law for the national organization. 
Such a militaristic preoccupation with trivial 
formality seems fatuous, somehow, in our 
democracy; but doubtless it is destined to 
relieve the social atmosphere of much of 
its tension with the general hat-knocking 
and scuffling among the women themselves 
that is bound to come, sooner or later, un- 
less the real battle-front is transplanted to 
these shores. 

Some decades before the crisis, the 
American woman nursed a sense of griev- 
ance which accounts for much in her 
peculiar characterization of war. Woman 
had been awakened by the discovery of 
her right to the suffrage and she had come 

1:753 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

to believe that it was withheld from her by 
the unfairness of man. Although nesting 
in privileges, exemptions and protections, 
woman reached out enviously for the per- 
quisites, the emoluments and the glories 
of men. She petitioned with time-honored 
grace, but was refused her womanly rights; 
she campaigned with Maenad strenuosity 
but was denied her human rights. She 
discovered that the things she wanted so 
much, man's baubled guerdon for toil and 
war, were the world's tribute to the mas- 
culine genius for bloodshed. She had been 
civilized into a bloodless sex. She had 
been modernized out of nature — red in 
tooth and claw. At all of which — woman 
smiled. Woman smiled first, cynically, and 
then in sublime surprise at — Herself. The 
war directly followed the feminist awaken- 
ing and it has brought woman's great op- 
portunity for a belated, spectacular success. 
Suddenly woman finds herself the re- 



THE LADY IN WAR 

cipient of all the favors and honors she had 

coveted so long in vain. The prima-vista 

of herself .in the battle-light to man has 

established her value as his helpmate in 

war, and /or war, at any price, and the war 

has shown that it needs a charming hostess 

to preside over its functions of bloodshed. 

Man now welcomes woman to her "at 

home" in war, and as proof of his delighted 

trust he has bestowed upon her his long 

treasured rights of the Suffrage, the Khaki 

and the Parade. Thus gratified to the 

limit in all her old desires, it seems that 

woman should have nothing more to ask 

from the hands of passing man. Yet 

certain leaders of the sex, habituated to 

begging, now supplicate for man's military 

rank, titles and decorations for woman's 

service, although woman is still the free, 

unconscripted fighter. 

The Lady is more femalized than the 

woman and therefore to be reckoned with 

1:773 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

in any accounting for the war. As ladies, 
the modern Amazons have stepped from 
their hmousines, condescending to mingle 
with the vulgar herd in order to patronize 
the war. In its blessed cause, the lady is 
willing to sell anything in public; even her 
smiles, her photographs and her kisses, in 
the streets and bazaars, and she does her 
work with the thrilling sense of absolution 
for everything said or done that no lady 
has experienced since the forgotten ab- 
solutions that once prevailed in the temples 
of Babylon. 

For the Lady loves the war. In a way 
it is her war. She has found her mission, 
self -fulfillment, and raison d'etre in its vigor- 
ous prosecution, and it is waged with the 
glorious objective of making the world 
safe for her and her possessions. The 
Lady represents the quintessential bloom 
of our kind of civilization; the reductio ad 
absurdum of all our social culture. The 



THE LADY IN WAR 

cult of the body, the caste of Mammon, 
the worship of Pomp, the gilding of cor- 
ruption, the sentimentalization of pain, 
the paint and whitewash, the lying and 
sanctifying, — they are all the distinguish- 
ing attributes of the lady and are also the 
brood of Reality that has nibbled away the 
foundations of man's crescent society. 

Once a beauty-loving Englishman sug- 
gested that the women of the world could 
end war and its preparations forever, simply 
by dressing themselves in black as a dem- 
onstration of their endless mourning until 
the men obeyed their Will-to-Peace. But 
the women have never adopted the pre- 
ventive mourning recommended by the 
great Ruskin, not even those who have 
posed as aesthetes and social reformers. 
When a woman specializes in black for her 
dress, it is merely as a sign of her eligibility 
of widowhood or as the sable mask of the 

demure adventuress. Black is adopted by 

1:793 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

a woman as a kind of camouflage for too 
much inner color. 

In the tragic mourning of today, woman 
wears her dark draperies with exultant 
pride as a testimony to her gift of life to 
the Machine of War. The popular Niobe 
sheds no tears of lament, and the public is 
filled with applause for the new woman of 
blood and iron, who, in the midst of her 
breavements, desires and supplies still more 
sons and men and babes to cast to the 
great machine. The Spartan mother has 
come into her own again; and no woman 
loves so nobly as she who loves war more 
than she loves man. 

''Why do you wear such deep mourning; 
is it to hide your tears .^" a courtier asked 
the beautific Mary, Queen of Scots. ''No, 
it is to hide my smiles, " replied the widowed 
coquette. To smile and smile and be a 
villain is the consummate paradox of fem- 
inine nature. 
CSO] 



THE LADY IN WAR 

In the pure realm of the animal kingdom, 
the display of teeth is regarded as a threat, 
that gallantly warns away; but with civi- 
lization, the display of teeth has come to 
signify a smile, and a woman's smile can 
deaden the mentality of man as effectively 
as the cruder arts of militarism. The 
Lady with her ever-ready automatic smile, 
her promiscuous smile, that is her mark of 
breeding, can accomplish everything neces- 
sary to recruit, enslave or victimize man 
for the purposes of sex or state. 

Owing to her profound indifference to 
everything except to the quickening of her 
own ego, the lady is exquisitely qualified 
to preside and smile over the dirty work of 
every era. She makes charity more de- 
lectable than justice, and the succor of 
the wounded so attractively touching, that 
the flurried mind of man cannot pause to 
think of causes or preventives in the world's 
travail. The Lady has a wreath of roses. 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

a mannered smile or a subtle bandage for 
all the deaths, wounds and sufferings of 
this barbaric age. 

These modern Amazons have been 
evolved from what we once considered an 
extinct species of legendary womanhood. 
But the old story of the Amazons can 
scarcely be a legend since it is found in 
the history of every race — Indian, Chinese, 
Aztec, Greek, Gaul and Teuton. The 
ancient races dreaded an onslaught of the 
Amazons with the panicky terror of the 
supernatural. Those great, gaunt, fero- 
cious she-warriors, as pitiless to self as to 
foe, who cut off their own breasts, mas- 
sacred and mutilated their victims, gave 
no quarter and took no prisoners in war. 
In ancient art, we find these frightful 
braves of the sex depicted with stern, 
deadly faces, but honest faces that have 
never been feminized by the smile. After 

woman developed the art of the smile, she 
1:823 



THE LADY IN WAR 

found it unnecessary to fight in the open. 
Why bleed and die for conquest and glory 
when all can be gained with little traps of 
sweetness? 

Art as a means of victory over might 
served to civilize woman into the modern 
ideal, the smiling lady. But for her secret 
knowledge, woman paid, Faust-like, with 
the pledge of her soul. To the world 
woman has kept her face and her reputa- 
tion (dearest of all possessions to the lady !) 
but to herself and to her own sex she has 
lived without a character. She has been 
the elusive one, the ever mysterious and 
unknown. The finest minds of men, from 
St. Paul to Otto Weininger, have failed 
to understand her or to fit her into their 
schemes of evolutive life. Woman has 
been regarded, through the homolegic cen- 
turies, as one accursed, afilicted, perverted, 
dwarfed, deformed, et cetera; the something 
inscrutably wrong about her always in- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

spiring the thought of mankind. The vast 
hterature upon the subject represents 
nothing but a vague dogmatism inspired 
by the prejudice of ignorance, which, per- 
haps, has been best expressed in the dictum 
of Sophocles that '* Woman is a disease." 

The modern apologists for woman have 
claimed that Fashion is responsible for all 
the absurdities and deformities of woman's 
body and mind. But as the eternal Ama- 
zon, and prospective leader to No Man's 
land, woman transcends the need of apol- 
ogists and reveals even her infirmities as 
virtues in the frightful adventure destined 
to come. The essential virtues of a soldier 
are suggestibility and automatism; and in 
these qualities, it is undeniable that even the 
raw, unfashioned female excels the male. 

A wise Rabbi has remarked, *' Deformed 
persons and eunuchs and old men and 
bastards are envious, for he that can not 
possibly mend his own case will do all he 

i:84] 



THE LADY IN WAR 

can to impair another's." The still of 
virulence thus engendered in woman by 
her inexorable handicap is invaluable to a 
maker of aggressive warfare. 

It is significant that physical handicaps 
have not impeded the success of the world's 
great male leaders in aggressive warfare, 
who so frequently have been degenerate in 
some way. Caesar suflfered from congenital 
weakness of constitution, but became the 
great Imperialist of antiquity. Napoleon 
was an undersized man, therefore di- 
minutive stature is no handicap to martial 
glory. Tamerlane was lame and '* slightly 
deformed," and yet made himself master 
of nearly the whole of Asia. The Kaiser 
has a withered arm, but developed the greed 
and the power to grasp for a world empire. 
There must be some truth in the psycho- 
analyst's theory that certain frustrations 
of the body can develop dreams and an 

apocalyptic temperament. 

i:85] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

The Chinese understand the psychology 
of woman. 

China is a peace-loving nation and 
founded the fashion of the foot-binding of 
women in order to limit their influence to 
the home. The Chinese have a popular 
term of reference to the wife as "The mean 
one of the inner rooms" which seems to 
imply the existence of unheard of wrongs 
of the Chinaman behind the closed door of 
the Orient. Subtly versed in life and 
woman-wise, the Chinaman has found a 
way to give to the Chinese ladies "with 
little feet like golden lilies" a method and 
right to self-expression that keeps the 
Celestial Empire comparatively free from 
the necessity of divorce as of war. In 
every town in China, there is a stand placed 
in some public square, where a woman is 
permitted to go and to pour forth her 
wrongs to the four winds of heaven and to 
curse her mother-in-law to her heart's 



THE LADY IN WAR 

content whenever she feels the urge to 
self-expression, combat or reprisals in the 
domestic sphere. The consecrated place is 
called "the scolding block," and when 
chartered upon it, the Chinese woman 
stands as a free-woman. Free from all the 
laws of family and state, for the duration 
of a free speech in public, — a salutary 
little saturnalia that unfangs woman for a 
deeper social hurt. We of the scientific 
west disdain the secrets of nature, and to 
our women give no safety-valve for their 
pent emotionalism, thus poisoning society 
with the femalized spirit of unreasoning 
animosity, ophidian spite and implacable 
grudge. 

Presumably the state system of marriage 
has acted upon woman's mind similarly to 
the state system of militarism upon man. 
Woman is the matrimonial militant, in- 
fatuated with instructions of a divine mis- 
sion, for whose sake the world seems well 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

lost. True to the state ideal of marriage, 
woman has become a past master in the 
tactics for a Holy War. As the Sacred 
Wife, she has fitted herself uniquely as a 
conspirator, a strategist and a spy, as a 
plunderer, a jailor and a generalissimo of 
the heart and home, whose real protection 
does not consist in the arms of man, as 
generally assumed, but in woman's worldly 
power as a camoufleur of Nature. 

The Lady of the Household aims to 
dominate the world, and none have yet 
dared to call her to account for the results 
of her rule in the home. In every pseudo- 
civihzed land there is a servant problem 
caused by the unrecognized fact that serv- 
ants of either sex feel a sense of degrada- 
tion in service to a Lady which they do not 
seem to experience when in the employ of 
a man. 

The taint of Ladydom is seen also in the 
shops that are patronized by the female of 
IS82 



THE LADY IN WAR 

our reigning plutocracy. Nowhere else in 
the work-a-day world can one encounter 
such manner (the feminine ideal of impress- 
of-will) as in the sham ladies who serve and 
ape the real ladies in their quest of display. 
As soon as a woman is enthroned, enriched 
or exalted above her own kind (the com- 
mon case in America) she becomes an 
imperator in imperio with the manners of a 
beggar on horseback, the morals of a 
soldier who kicks his dog because his 
captain kicked him, and her almighty in- 
fluence in the world serves solely to excite 
in humanity an insolent lust for power that 
can create a kakistocracy out of man's 
most ideal democracy. 

Owing to the lack of democracy in the 
cultural makeup of womankind, the great 
democracies have been progressively de- 
clining the past hundred years. The es- 
sense of democracy is in the aboUtion of 
Privilege, and woman's whole orientation 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

is towards the safeguarding and aggrandiz- 
ing of privilege, even though it may exact 
the sacrifice of all her life's progeny upon 
the globe. Such a feminine spirit has 
been the protection and support of the 
Throne, the Church and the State in their 
various historical spells of bloodshed. 

Engines, dynamos, ships and nations 
have always been spoken of in the feminine 
gender. Curiously enough, when one con- 
siders how they represent the chief feats of 
creative man. The war itself is regarded 
by most people as the outcome of an an- 
thropocentric civilization, the inevitable, 
ultimate expression, as it were, of the male 
genius unorientated by woman's genius as 
the life-giver. Naturally, a Chinaman 
would differ from this wholly occidental 
conception, and the acute philosopher 
K'ung Yuan Ku'suh has given us "The 
Judgement of the Orient" in a minute 

volume that supplies another key to the 
CQOa 



THE LADY IN WAR 

world-problem of war. The substance of 
its thought might be given as follows: 

The great war is a war of souls, and as 
souls have sex as well as stature, it is a war 
of sex. The psychological genesis of the 
war between Germany and Europe is sexual. 
It is a war between the femininity of Ger- 
many and the masculinity of her neighbors, 
especially the masculinity of England. The 
war is essentially a contest for supremacy 
between feminine and masculine ideals. 
The feminine ideal reaches toward material 
aggrandizement and sanctions the employ- 
ment of all measures capable of attaining 
the desired goal. To a woman the end al- 
ways justifies the means. The female soul 
of Germany captured the industrial ef- 
ficiency of the nation, cajoled the nation 
to adopt a criminal ambition, and finally 
provoked the nation to offend beyond for- 
giveness the entire masculine world. When 
the female soul collectively predominates. 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

the nation is potentially dishonest. The 
female soul is an envious and grasping 
spirit. It respects no rights that cannot be 
enforced. The social condition of Ger- 
many supplies a further proof that the 
nation is under feminine dominion. The 
women of Germany have never shown 
themselves solicitous of political enfran- 
chisement. It is because their power of 
government through sex is complete enough 
to satisfy their instinct to excel and to en- 
slave. The men of Germany are peculiarly 
uxorious, and are but pampered helots in 
their home and country. Women do not 
rebel against masculine ill-usage which as- 
sumes the form of an apparent sexual 
tyranny. Well they know who are the 
real tyrants in the eternal processes of 
conjugation. — It is significant that Turkey 
is Germany's ally in the war. Turkey has 
but one conspicuous national institution — 
the seraglio. The sensual male is the pre- 



THE LADY IN WAR 

destined servant of femininity. The soul 
of Turkey is depraved and essentially ef- 
feminate. — The men of Germany toiled 
and worked for years with the ambition of 
conquest, that is, plunder, in their minds. 
When many men decide to steal, it is never 
for their personal advantage, but always 
for the state (that is, for the wives and 
daughters and sweethearts of the thieves) 
and the women of a robber nation if they 
countenance their men's ambition, are the 
responsible and real culprits ; for the women 
of the nation are the nurses and the tutors 
of the men. — Per contra, England is the 
most virile state in Europe with a pre- 
dominately mascuhne soul. The male soul 
is apt to be cruel, but it is incapable of 
spite. It can hate even unto death, but 
it is always willing to raise a fallen enemy. 
It can willfully destroy but it cannot de- 
liberately torture. It loves justice and 
except when influenced by passion, it vol- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

untarily serves the ends of Justice. It is 
purely womanly to persecute, to torture 
and to hit below the belt. The female 
soul neither loves nor hates justice, and 
the only cause it can serve with spontaneity 
is that of generation. 

This Chinese theory of the cause of the 
war can not be discredited as an expression 
of misogynous orientalism, for even in the 
western world of popular feminism, the 
latest writers on the subject seem, all un- 
consciously, to coincide with this view. 
An American writer in a recent rhapsody 
on *' Woman" (all rhapsodists on that 
subject are male) declares that: Woman's 
star-like faculty of order — her energy for 
organization — finds outlet most readily in 
War, and he assumes, "You have not 
forgotten it was woman who invented — 
or revealed — modern ways of war-making. 
Three modes of warring she revealed and 

Napoleon and Joffre had but to perfect 
1:943 



THE LADY IN WAR 

them: 1st. The methodic organization of 
cavalry. 2nd. Open order in infantry at- 
tack. 3rd. The grouping of artillery. 
The woman who did this thing was Jeanne 
d'Arc and she holds today the record of 
generalship — three victories in three suc- 
cessive days." 

And so a spontaneous mobilization of 
women is taking place all over the world, 
while the men are engaged in waging the 
war that is to end war, as they raptly be- 
lieve. At the moment of this writing, one 
reads in the press a statement that Austria 
has expressed concern over "the increasing 
effeminization of the Army." In Vienna 
women are being enlisted at the rate of 
150,000 a month and are now being sent 
into the field to serve behind the Front — 
until the day of the trumpet-call for 
Woman. The Teuton, of course, never 
dreamed of such a denouement to his 

glorious masculinized war; but woman is 

1:953 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

the chosen instrument of Nature, and the 
hand of nature is becoming evident in the 
great fatahty of today. 

In war time, woman has always functioned 
mysteriously with the everlasting processes 
of nature, which has kept her dreadful and 
powerful over man. Formerly her work 
has been the production of an excess of the 
male over the female babies born in war- 
time. An inexplicable adaptation of the 
female's viparious genius to the needs of 
war, over which every woman herself has 
wondered, and secretly smiled. 

The urgent need of woman's forces to- 
day surpasses everything hitherto expected 
of her. Thus she can no longer rest con- 
tent in a mere travail for male babes to 
exceed the female babes while the world is 
in its orgy of depopulation. A still greater 
duty devolves upon her to restore the bal- 
ance of the sexes and the dizzy planet to a 

conclusive standpoint again. The pos- 
11963 



T H E LADY IN WAR 

sibility of inconclusiveness from the war — 
of an end of sheer futihty to follow the 
mighty holocaust of men — is the most 
terrible aspect of the whole situation. 

Evidently there could be nothing con- 
clusive in a war or peace that left the world 
dense with a female population bereft of 
the nobility of men. Such an ultimate 
would bring upon humanity worse disasters 
than a perpetuity of war. Compulsory 
polygamy, for instance, or female infan- 
ticide. The usual resorts of a war- 
chastened people, which certainly would 
not save the face of our modern Society. 

To the world's tragic emergency, woman 
has arisen as if from the deepest recesses 
of the cosmic being. Her biological im- 
perative is directed upon the war after the 
war, the war of Woman versus Woman, 
the true Armageddon, which will wipe out 
the past and present mistakes of mankind, 

in life-giving and death-dealing, and give 

con 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

to the human race a chance to begin all 
over again. One can easily imagine an 
ideal objective to this sequential war — 
waged by woman in league with Nature: 
the Fittest alone to survive, no doubt, in 
the form of a harmonized Two, the Eternal 
Couple, whose sophisticated loving can 
repopulate the earth with a new kind of 
humanity, war-proof, at least. 

The best fighting man of our period re- 
gards war as a senseless butchery, a bloody 
shambles of satanic destruction. But to 
woman, war appears as an ordained Ob- 
stetrics from which everything New must 
be born. When science first discovered 
the value of anaesthetics, woman leagued 
with the Church in opposing its use in 
childbirth. Pain has been supposed to be 
a divine prerogative of the female, and all 
the glorification she has ever received has 
been as a volunteer or a victim of pain. 
Both rehgion and science have made it 
1:983 



THE LADY IN WAR 

clear that woman is organized uniquely to 
endure, to embrace and to glory in the pain 
inflicted upon her by man or God. This 
constitutes woman's "mystery," physio- 
logically, and also constitutes her sublime 
fitness for war. 

In war woman will neither suffer nor die 
with the fatal facility of man. Her su- 
perior longevity has been proven in the 
statistics of every nation. Quite lately it 
has been demonstrated in a report of the 
British Health Department that the health 
of the English women has actually im- 
proved during the war, in spite of all their 
bereavements, unaccustomed labors and 
deprivations. Such a proof as this should 
rid the world of all its squeamish pacifists, 
conscientious objectors and disloyal ob- 
structionists when the time comes for the 
Next War. 

In the multiform reactions to the war, 

humanity has become calloused in that 

1:993 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

wholesome way which condemns all pes- 
simists, slackers, and shell-shocked people 
as the morbid imponderabilia of the species, 
who should be exterminated as rapidly as 
possible. A hardy race that can survive 
every shock of dismay, pity, or horror, and 
find its joy in violence, its laughter in 
death, and a decoration in every wound, 
has become the desideratum of the con- 
temporary morale. Thus the Austrian 
writer, Andreas Latzko, who has produced 
a Dantesque masterpiece of the war, is 
called *'mad" by the smugly sane reviewers 
of the U. S. A. But in his terrible book is 
found a viva-voce upon the great surprise of 
women in the war showing how it may af- 
fect some men. 

It is the story of a Lieutenant who is 
supposed to be suffering from shell-shock 
when, one day, while sitting in the Hospital 
Gardens, he burst forth in a tirade against 
women in war — as the cause of the shock 
that has unmanned him. 



THE LADY IN WAR 

'*Did it surprise you to find out that war 
is horrible?" cries the convalescent oflScer 
to his comrades. ''The only surprising thing 
was the going off. To find out that the 
women are horrible — that was the sur- 
prising thing. That they can smile and 
throw roses, that they can give up their 
men, their children, the boys they have 
put to bed a thousand times and pulled the 
covers over a thousand times and petted 
and brought up to be men. That was the 
surprise. That they gave us up — that 
they sent us — sent us ! Because everyone 
of them would have been ashamed to stand 
there without a hero. Once they had the 
chance to protect us, — but all they cared 
about was being in style — nothing else in 
the world but just being in style." 



ClOl] 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

The war has turned out not to be a 
gentleman's war, says Veblen in his ob- 
servations on the excessive death rate 
among the British gentleman officers, for 
"it is a war in which all the specific traits 
of the well-bred and gently minded man are 
a handicap, in which veracity, gallantry, 
humanity, liberality, are conducive to 
nothing but defeat and humiliation." 

The war, in one aspect, can be seen as a 
combat between the real gentleman of 
England and the sham nobleman of Ger- 
many. The gentleman is the type of 
manhood evolved by Anglo-Saxon ideals 
and culture, and his instincts have had a 
robust exegesis as the Knight, the Christian 
and the Sportsman. In Germany there is 

C 105 3 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

no national word for "gentleman," or for 
"character," and once when Huber at- 
tempted to describe to his countrymen the 
gentlemen of England, he accomplished it 
deftly with the words: "In Germany we 
have nothing of the kind." 

It was because Germany failed to under- 
stand the attributes of the gentleman of 
England that she dared to spring the war 
upon the world with an attack upon the 
weak. Instinctively the gentleman pro- 
tects the weak. It seems that nature has 
done her bit to make the world safe for 
humanity by giving two instincts to ani- 
mals and men: one to conquer, the other to 
protect. The Germans were specialized to 
conquer. Their Prussianization began 
with ambivalence. But the modelers 
who aimed to make a super-type out of 
plain Fritz, quite overlooked the sanifying 
principle of protection — as nature reveals 
it in care and chivalry for the weak — and 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

SO they evolved their Strong Man whose 
inhumanity has shocked all the simple 
peoples and fine gentlemen of the earth. 

The Strong Man of Germany has been 
exposed in the war as the freak in whom 
there dwells no grace of life. He will pass 
away like the mistakes of the saurian age, 
for he has shown his unfitness to survive 
in a humanity that owes its soundness to 
the protective instinct of its superior types 
of men. A thinker, unique in modern 
Germany, Rudolf Gottscheid, told his heed- 
less people when drunk on the Nietzschean 
creed that "The protection of the weak so 
frequently condemned by some neo-Dar- 
winians is in reality the protection of the 
strong from degeneration." 

Germany forgot to protect her Strong 
Man when she educated him to despise 
and crush and traflBc in the weak. Lame 
as the iron-forger Vulcan, in his moral 
weakness, repulsive as Caliban in his hu- 
man caricaturing, he now serves the world 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

as a great object lesson of the failure of the 
Strong-all-too-Strong. 

When the German lost his gentle in- 
stinct he lost his empire. The truly great 
are strong enough to love to be just, to be 
merciful, protective and kind. Minus the 
saving grace of this instinct, the fatal nation 
has produced its great mass of little ab- 
normal men, erudite cretins and spectacled 
boors, so amazingly equipped to go just so 
far and no farther, suddenly stopped amidst 
a crescent progress by their sheer inability 
to get under the other man's skin. 

The instinct refined into what might be 
called a gift for mutuality distinguishes 
the gentleman. His honor consists in the 
frank acknowledgment of two sides to 
every question and in his readiness to see 
the fairness of a thing outside of himself. 
He can get under the other man's skin, 
whether a white, yellow or black skin: to 
which deHcate feat he owes his courtesy 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

and his empire. His ambition is to be 
master of himself. Sensitive and alert to 
the enemy within himself, he is slow to 
look for the enemy beyond his castle-home 
or his frontiers, — one source of his "weak- 
ness" before the Hun's attack upon the 
Hosts of the world. Weakness — by the 
blonde beast standard, yet this type of 
mankind has won for Great Britain her 
far-flung empire and title of a Nation of 
Gentlemen. 

One of the great gentlemen of England, 
King Edward the Seventh, made secure for 
his country the leadership of the modern 
world through the tact and amplified hu- 
manism of his foreign diplomacy. As a 
contrast, the world-imperialist, William the 
Second, has lost to Germany all her former 
prestige and colonial power, simply be- 
cause he is no gentleman. He is the ar- 
rogant sham, the vulgar bully of the 
peacock Sieges Allee, from whom the naive 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

and the worldly flee as from an exhibit of 

the "human nature" which violates one's 

instinct for the decencies. Even the He- 

reros of Southwest Africa refused to accept 

the German Emperor for the real thing and 

after one of his attempts at Germanizing 

("to introduce Christian customs and 

Christian Morality among the negroes" as 

the Emperor phrased it to the Reichstag) 

the Hereros revolted and massacred the 

German colonists while sparing the Boers 

and the English, their former masters. 

The English gentleman is a wholesome 

compound of the Norseman and the 

Puritan, seasoned with much Attic salt. 

He has perfected his Anglican conscience 

and his Oxford manner, but he retains his 

vascular splendor of an outdoor animal. 

Nature is a religion to him, but he treats 

her as he treats his Britannia and his 

Crown, things so intimately precious that 

he is a bit too free and easy with them. 
Clio 3 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

He is SO sure of himself and so secure in 
his kingdom of brutes and gods, that he 
affects nothing except modesty. Sophis- 
ticated into simpKcity, and scrupulously 
genuine, he is a queer mystery only be- 
cause he is guided wholly by feeling, a 
secret he will never betray. It is his feel- 
ing for nature, his rapport with life, that 
makes the English gentleman the peerless 
thoroughbred with horses, dogs and less 
noble mammals, all of whom instinctively 
recognize in him their master — his own 
master — the omniscient one who protects 
as well as conquers. He understands every- 
thing for everything is within him, out- 
grown or growing. 

The German, on the other hand, does 
not understand nature, animals, savages or 
the gentleman. He has no sympathy, im- 
agination or detachment with which to 
understand. "Germany is a nation of 
houseservants," — a comment of the Iron 

Clin 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Chancellor in explanation of the Teutonic 
characteristics displayed in his day as 
obsequiousness to the superior and abuse 
of the inferior, in place or power. And 
in his "natural relations" the German 
reveals the same attitude of ignoble con- 
queror. As a husband he beats or brow- 
beats his slavish wife; as a father he 
distinguishes his country for its suicide- 
statistics of children; and towards animals 
he is the strong pitiless master who, in- 
cidentally, started the modern craze for 
vivisection, a true Prussian furor of the 
past twenty odd years. "Nature" to a 
German means something which nature 
herself is striving to work out of the human 
system as a part of the original disorder of 
the universe. Thus the conduct of the 
German soldiery at Louvain represented a 
grand manifestation of human nature to 
the German people, although its infer- 
nal theatricality had been deliberated and 
1:1123 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

planned through forty years of that grim 
kultur which sought to extract the strength 
of civihzation without its goodness. 

The beau ideal of Germany is the Prussian 
officer, a flamboyant cad who possesses 
neither pohsh nor personahty but attempts 
to don them both with a sword and shining 
armor. It is only the gentleman who 
can aflFord to dress unpretentiously, to be 
at ease in restraint of manner, and to com- 
mand others with his mere presence as a 
Sahib without the lifting of a little finger. 
The polished men of Great Britain have 
been her peerless empire-builders, her ex- 
plorers, adventurers and colonizers, bril- 
liant, valorous, understanding men, with 
steady nerves and an exquisite sensibility. 

Four centuries too late. Imperial Ger- 
many started her aggressive Weltpolitik for 
the place in the sun which England has 
occupied since the sixteenth century, ripen- 
ing lazily in her radiant sovereignty. It 

1:1133 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

was all so easy for her, the flowing of life 
to Greater Britain, that she did not realize 
her own possessions nor construct a definite 
colonial policy until Lord Durham issued 
the Magna Charta of the Colonies in 1839. 
The American Revolution — caused by the 
autocratic blundering of a German King, 
George the Third, on the English throne — 
and the Industrial Revolution which democ- 
ratized England as ''The Workshop of the 
World" — inspired the English to face and 
master the problem of their organic imperial- 
ism, which has established the Pax Britan- 
nica throughout a quarter of the globe. 

The Englishman awoke in the nineteenth 
century to find himself a world conqueror, 
the unselfconscious master — rather an- 
noyed, if anything, at the tremendous 
burden of four hundred millions of human 
beings of all races and stages and climes, 
dumped upon his shoulders. But respon- 
sibihty ennobled him. England, ''Mother 
nil4 3 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

of Parliaments, " is also the mother of all 
modern humanitarian ideals. 

The German conqueror of the twentieth 
century, with his laborious grandeur of the 
iron heel and mailed fist, has conquered 
nothing and no one, least of all himself. 
A rank impostor even as a strong man, for 
when he is given the order to *'be strong" 
from the High Command, he has nothing 
to fall back upon in his liberated being but 
the yellow streak in himself, the blonde 
beastliness, that is conquered by a soundly 
constituted man. Freedom means orgy to 
the German; humanity means prey; but 
his beastliness has neither the pure in- 
stincts nor simple nobility of nature's lost 
wilds. He has been trained by the Kaiser, 
who, like Carl Hagenback, the German 
called the greatest animal trainer in the 
world, conquers nature with the cage and 
iron and perverts the feral instincts into a 
strange fury with their taming. 

1:1153 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Germanization is rejected by every 
healthy instinct of animals, savages and all 
ranks of men. It is a violation of every- 
thing worth protecting in life: the sancti- 
ties of self and the right to individuality of 
races and nations. The Germans, after 
decades of power over the Danes, the Poles 
and the Alsatians are still passionately re- 
jected by them as unfit masters, swagger- 
ing nobodies, conquerors who lack every 
element of greatness tried by the supreme 
test — the possession of power over others. 

When empanoplied in power over others, 
the German expresses his nature in the in- 
humanity that is deaf, blind and dumb to 
every appeal and claim upon the noblesse 
oblige of the mighty. The sense of power 
alone does not satisfy his monstrous vanity 
of the instinct to conquer, so he adds in- 
sult to injury and gluts his outre passions 
in trampUng upon the fallen enemy, in 
humiliating the disarmed, in wreaking re- 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

prisals upon the innocent, in waging a 
pitiless warfare against babes and women 
and wounded and prisoners in a triumphant 
meanness that to him is glory. 

But the more highly organized English 
conqueror comes into his own with power 
and finds a sporty pleasure in being gener- 
ous and splendid to the fallen enemy. 
With the Union Jack he plants the spirit 
of freedom and the courtesies of Fontenoy 
— and after that he rests and is amused 
at the growth of Great Britain whose 
guiding vision is the humanity that is 
above the nations. 

The English observe the punctilio of 
good-form with their polyglot peoples all 
over the world, and do not try to Anglicize 
them. In fact, variety in humanity is a 
spice to the good-nature of the English- 
man who just happened to run across his 
vast empire through an adventurous curi- 
osity to meet and understand the strange 

Clin 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

folk of this pluralistic old planet. Years 
ago, an American savant pointed out for 
the admiration of mankind how the English 
administered the code of every empire and 
race under their rule: "In Canada, old 
French law; in the Mauritius, the Code 
Napoleon; in the West Indies, the edicts 
of the Spanish Cortes; in the East Indies, 
the Laws of Menu; in the Isle of Man, of 
the Scandinavian Thing; at the Cape of 
Good Hope, of the Old Netherlands; and in 
the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Jus- 
tinian." 

This imperial policy of deference to the 
nature of the people they rule, is the secret 
of England's success and unsought su- 
periority. The English conqueror makes 
le beau geste of liberation to the conquered, 
grasps his hand in honor of their mutual 
humanity, and then is worried ever after- 
wards how to do the right thing by him. 
It is thus that England has conquered her 
CHS] 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

great peoples, and in paying them the deH- 
cate compHment of their freedom, has 
attached them to her with indissolvable 
bonds of sentiment or enlightened self- 
interest. The world war has made this 
most evident in England's five great self- 
governing dominions, Canada, Australia, 
Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South 
Africa, all of whom spontaneously flew to 
the protection of the great Commonwealth 
when endangered. 

Other tributes have come to England 
from her conquered peoples in honor of 
her intrinsic greatness. From the Boers, 
for instance. After the Boer war, the 
English seemed overzealous in their desire 
to spare the Boers the sense of their defeat. 
They gave complete autonomy to the South 
African colonies, and Louis Botha, who had 
fought against them so valiantly, was 
made the first Prime Minister of the Union 
of South Africa. The English and the 
Dutch were recognized as the ofiicial lan- 

1:1193 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

guages and the Roman-Dutch law was 
adopted for the common law in the Act of 
Union. The fruits of England's generosity 
are seen in the conversion of her former 
enemies into the British Generals of today 
who are helping to realize the dream of 
Cecil Rhodes for a South Africa organized 
in one great British confederacy. For it is 
General Botha who has conquered German 
Southwest Africa, and General Smuts, a 
Boer also, who has conquered German 
East Africa for Great Britain. 

The English and the French figure in 
history as. "hereditary enemies," but, it is 
said, the restoration of peace after a war 
between them generally serves as a signal 
for an outburst of acute Anglomania in 
France; and the Fashoda Affair of 1898 
culminated in the Entente Cordiale, 

A Frenchman, Andre Chevrillon, has 
written a remarkable book on "England 
and the War" which portrays the English 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

as the character sympatica of the war, and 
relates innumerable instances of the chivalry 
of the English towards the Germans during 
these years of German f rightfulness, a 
chivalry quite lost on the German men- 
tality, however, which long ago analyzed 
this trait as one of the weaknesses of a 
decadent people. 

The German defect is found even in 
Germany's air-men, a class of men who 
pride themselves upon their knightliness 
and sportsmanship in all other nations. 
The gallant air-men of the Allies have 
tried in vain to discover and acclaim some 
signs of their own spirit in their German 
adversaries and give to the dead military 
funerals, in honor of their winged calling. 
A recent case is that of Baron Richthofen, 
the German Ace, who brought down eighty 
of the Allied flyers and was pronounced 
Germany's greatest aviator, although he 
never went out without his fleet, or "gang," 

cm] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

and made a specialty of picking on novices. 
He was killed in his machine which fell 
behind the British lines, and was accorded 
a splendid funeral with full military honors, 
by his British enemies. 

In the Middle Ages the Germans aped 
the knightliness then the continental 
fashion, but Froissart lamented that it was 
impossible to teach the Germans the prin- 
ciples of true knightliness. Misunder- 
standings of the ideal such as the following 
related by one historian were common in 
mediaeval Germany: ''At Stralsund it was 
customary to nail up a cat by the tail, and 
a man 'fought' it until he had beaten it 
to death, when he was made a 'knight' by 
the burgomaster." 

An ethnologist, Madison Grant, at- 
tributes to the Thirty Years' War, the 
devolution of the German. He writes: 
"The Thirty Years' War virtually de- 
stroyed the land-owning yeomanry and 

cm] 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

lesser gentry formerly found in Germany 
as numerously as in France or England. 
This section of the population was largely 
exterminated and the class of gentlemen 
practically vanishes from German history 
from that time on. When The Thirty 
Years' War was over, there remained in 
Germany nothing except the brutalized 
peasants and the high nobility which turned 
from the toils of endless warfare to mimic 
on a small scale the court of Versailles. 
Today the ghastly rarity in the German 
armies of chivalry and generosity toward 
women and of knightly protection and 
courtesy towards the prisoners and wounded 
can be largely attributed to the annihila- 
tion of the gentle class. The Germans of 
today whether they live on the farms or in 
the cities are for the most part descendents 
of the peasants who survived, not of the 
brilliant knights and hardy foot-soldiers 

who fell in the mighty conflict." 

1:1233 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

In the decades of German popularity 
before the war, the people of the world were 
predisposed to trust the Germans be- 
cause of their exploited "naturalness." 
These parvenus of Europe who talked with 
gusto of their own greatness and flouted 
every canon of gentility, possessed an en- 
gaging freakishness to the suave races of 
other nations, too conscious of the faults 
of their own kind of civilization : — cant, 
humbug, and a false social stratification. 

One did not look for a poseur or a hypo- 
crite in the modern German with his 
notorious bad manners, bad taste and 
undisguised appetites. He passed as "the 
natural man" for whom the neo-revolu- 
tionary modern of the Great Democracies 
has a real hospitality transmitted from 
Rousseau's day and gospel of a noble man 
of nature versus "the animal depraved by 
thought," which, incidentally, was a cause 
of the French Revolution as a revolt of 

cm] 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

instinct against the sham gentleman of 
that period, the Grand Seigneur of the Hall 
of Mirrors. Teutonic Realism was once 
like a morning gust of nature throughout 
the tired, white world. Surely Berlin 
seemed plotting for some rejuvenating re- 
turn to nature with her spectacular tastes 
and fads of Tannhauser, Wedekind, Bleib- 
treu, the Kneipp Cure, Schools of the Nude 
and Baths of Blood, — applauded by the 
intelligentzia all over the world. The Ger- 
mans were treated like naughty children of 
nature who tell shocking truths to their 
squeamish elders, fearful lest they destroy 
their gorgeous elan vital. 

But nothing childlike is in that strange 
German psychology with its overelaborated 
cunning of a primitive nature. **Talk of 
hatred distinguishes the non-gentleman 
from the gentleman and usually reveals a 
primitive nature," is a subtle distinction 

made by Chevrillon. Hatred is a sort of 

1:1253 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

left-handed compliment paid by the boor 
to the gentleman which the gentleman 
never pays to the boor no matter how of- 
fensive his manners may be. Before the 
Germans concentrated their endemic hatred 
upon the English, it was directed upon the 
French as the inimitable nation. In 
Goethe's phrase, ''A true German hates a 
Frenchman," which for many years formed 
the inexplicable morale of the German 
people towards their neighbors, giving rise 
to another saying among the Alsatians, 
" Une querelle Allemande, " as descriptive of 
a quarrel without cause or provocation. 

Phyletically, the Germans are at that 
stage of development when hate and love 
are oddly confused in their nature as ap- 
petite. The primitive man wants to devour 
the object of his hate and also of his love. 
A desire for union is the elementary im- 
pulse of both passions. When frustrated 

in his desire, the primitive man hates the 
i:i26 3 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

object of his attentions, whereas the civil- 
ized man will hate himself for any con- 
tinuation of a hopeless desire. In German 
hatred of France, and later of England, 
there is the terrible compliment of the 
suitor who does his wooing with a club. 

Greater nations have arrived at the stage 
of mutuality in their foreign relations and 
when enamoured by some territorial charm, 
they seek possession by means of purchase 
or international agreements as a less costly 
mode of conquest than war. But when 
the German wants a thing, his jealous sense 
of possession is gratified only when he sees 
it at his feet, bleeding, weeping, belonging 
wholly to him. Whether lover or foe, the 
German acts much the same towards the 
attractive object, in his subconscious urge 
to destroy. This is why the Germans 
seem so naive to the rest of the world today 
in their sheer inability to realize the fact 

of the undying estrangement of the Bel- 

1:1273 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

gians to their German conquerors. For 
the rape of Belgium merely fulfilled Ger- 
many's idea of a marriage of nations. 

Renan remarked in IS'^O that the Prus- 
sians had so few joys in life that they found 
their greatest divertissement in hate. 
Doubtless the German bias for hating has 
its "archaic unreason" in the inhibited in- 
stinct of play. The Prussian system of 
education and discipline is calculated to 
pervert the natural instinct of youth for 
fun into the spirit of deviltry for which 
the Germans have a word — not found 
in any other language — Schadenfreude, 
meaning the fun of cruelty. There are no 
competitive games in the schools and uni- 
versities of Germany such as form the chief 
part of the Enghsh curriculum. The Ger- 
man student is given gymnastics instead of 
athletics, and drilling and duelling supply 
his exercise and sport. Regarding duelling, 

Schopenhauer said in his essay on 
i:i28 3 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

''Honour" that nations of such admitted 
viriKty as the British could do without 
duelhng. 

The first requisite of a gentleman is to 
be a perfect animal, says Emerson, strik- 
ing the core of the English system of edu- 
cation in which open-air games and sports 
are of first importance. The playgrounds 
of England have perfected the English 
gentleman as nature's nobleman, who will 
play fair even with his meanest enemy. 
Characteristically, he greeted the German 
hymn of hate, once so popular with ''Gott 
strafe England,'' as a parrot cry in Germany. 
The Germans used to sing their hymn of 
hate across the trenches to the British 
soldiers, to "terrify" them according to 
orders, but the British invariably echoed 
back the barbaric chant, word for word, 
with a frolic unction that completely mysti- 
fied and silenced the Huns. The English 

spirit of pluck and play — their ef- 

1:1293 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

florescence in liberty, as it were — is some- 
thing the Germans were not prepared to 
encounter nor to understand. They can 
only sneer wonderingly at these strange 
creatures from another sphere, who con- 
front Moloch with such a nimble insolence, 
but stoop to the weakest — with a strength 
all gentleness. It is this golden streak in 
the good breeding of Englishmen that 
perpetuates England's aristocratic ideal and 
caste-distinctions even in this latest day of 
her dynamic democracy. For the raw 
material of the ideal — the common people 
and common soldiers of Great Britain — 
demand, more than ever, to have "real 
gentlemen" for their leaders in peace or 
war, which seems a suflficient testimony to 
the real victor in this conflict of civiliza- 
tions. 

The Germans, in their fierce hatchings of 
empire from a cannon ball, never dreamed 

of the trouble they were bound to have 
ni30 3 



THE GENTLEMAN IN WAR 

with the gentlemen of England. At last 
they are recognized as a powerful breed of 
the well-born who can play the game of 
life or death in a way that takes the enemy 
by surprise and routs or masters him. 
The British soldiers take trenches from the 
Boches while playing foot-ball; they in- 
sist upon their five-o'clock tea while dodg- 
ing the compliments of Big Berthas; they 
grumble over missing a "morning tub" 
and are absurdly anxious to feed the poor 
devil of a Kamerad who trembles before 
them; they are bounteous and gay and 
prayerful, and believe, quite simply, in a 
world made safe for themselves and for 
others ; — and yet, as the Duke of Welling- 
ton said of the gently-reared young aris- 
tocrats of the Life Guards, '*The puppies 
fight well." 

And finally they have beaten Germany 
at her own game, her great and only game, 
Kriegspiel, with their genius for saving life 

cm] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

as well as for destroying its destroyers, 
with their Tanks — the trump of the game, 
invented by one of their own kind in the 
crucial stage of the bloody game ! — the 
Tanks that are like an emblem of Great 
Britain herself, muddling through, some- 
how, slow, safe, and sure in her magnifi- 
cent empiricism inspired by "the sublime 
instinct of an ancient race." 



1:1323 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

The months of July and August were 
once known in France as the months of the 
Great Fear. For during these months in 
the year 1789 there occurred a strange 
epidemic of terror among the French people. 
No one knew how the great fear arose, its 
cause nor object, but it seized upon the 
minds of all, men, women and children, in 
towns and country, and filled them with a 
nameless conviction of some dreadful thing 
to occur at this period. 

In the atmosphere of fear's infectious 
credulity, all sorts of rumors and alarms 
spread among the population; but the 
form in which it expressed itself in words 
was: "The brigands are coming." Who 
the brigands were, whence they were to 
come, no one knew. But the spell of fear 

C135 3 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

lasted the two fevered months of summer 
during which the French people exhibited 
that morbid state of the collective psy- 
chosis to which is due all the strange faiths 
and deeds of humanity. 

And nothing happened during the spell- 
bound period to justifj^ the strange faith of 
the people. 

It reached its cUmax on a certain day, 
July 29, which was spoken of long after- 
wards in Gueret and other towns near 
Paris as '*The Day of the Great Fear." 
On this day, in the dusk of the evening, 
the rumor arose that **The brigands are 
coming." The news spread by word of 
mouth but no one could give its authority. 
At last the brigands were described as 
crossing the Marne, and at Chateau-Thierry 
a message was received that 2500 brigands 
were marching along the Soissons road — 
on to Paris. The tocsins rang. The women 
fled from the towns and hid themselves. 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

and the men were summoned to meet in 
the Hotel-de-Ville and formed themselves 
into an armed force to assist the town 
mihtia. Committees were organized which 
sent dispatches to all the neighboring dis- 
tricts for aid, and the armed citizens 
marched forth to meet the mysterious 
enemy — which never appeared. 

When Germany started forth, in August, 
1914, to fight her *' world of enemies" at 
the bidding of her crowned brigand to the 
long-prepared '* defensive war," — the faith 
of her people was as irrational, their fear 
as fantastic, their enemy as myth-made, 
their minds as fevered by unreaUties, — 
as were the French people during this 
forgotten period of the phenomenon of the 
Great Fear. 

It is the tragedy of historical life that 

the imperative realities of one age become 

the fatuous unrealities of the next. It 

makes man's record on earth seem a mere 

1:137 3 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

chronology of manias, superstitions, sense- 
less fears, panics and blind mass-movements. 

The credulous, stupid, irresponsible, 
crazy self in mankind, — whence is its 
source, recurrence and perpetuity as the 
invisible actor, scene-shifter, and conductor 
in the blood-and-thunder drama of human 
affairs? 

No form of culture or civilization has 
yet been found to preserve humanity against 
its strange spells. The rise and fall of 
Empires, the grandeur and degeneration 
of peoples, have their secret in that inner 
life of man — the demonic afflatus — that 
vents itself in the winds and wilds and chaos 
of destruction. 

Germany stands as its latest and most 
colossal victim. Modern Germany has be- 
come a nation of strangely possessed beings 
whose psychology has mystified the world. 

Since the beginning of the war, the com- 
mentaries upon Germany, from every race 
i:i38 3 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GEflMANTT 

and nation, have expressed the same dark 
bewonderment and vision of her as a 
nation gone insane. Germany, the mad- 
dog of Europe, running amuck on lands 
and seas, bhnd Germany, megalomaniacal 
Germany, war-crazed Germany, — such is 
the world's concensus of opinion regard- 
ing the conduct and character of Germany 
and the Germans. 

Can a nation go insane .^^ 

History is replete with the evidence. 
The mediaeval mind was an insane mind. 
All Europe at one time was the fete-ground 
of mad -men exultant in auto-da-fes, holy 
massacres, the Inquisition tortures, witch- 
hunting, etc. One thousand years of the 
culture of the religious fears in man ter- 
minated in this collective orgy that marked 
the Dark Ages. The mediaeval psychology 
was that of the innermost self in man 
when his controlling consciousness is sur- 
rendered to an overlordship. 

1:1393 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Sidis describes these benighted centuries 
as — ''Times in which abnormal social 
suggestibility was displayed upon a grand 
scale — times full of mobs, riots, of blind 
movements of vast human masses, of ter- 
rible epidemics ravaging Europe from end 
to end. They were ages peculiar for the 
seemingly strange fact that whole cities, 
extensive provinces, great countries were 
stricken by one mental disease. Men went 
mad in packs, in tens of thousands. An 
obscure individual in some remote country 
place went off into fits of hysterics, and soon 
nations were struggling in convulsions of 
hysterical insanity." 

In the present convulsion of the world 
in war, the dark ages seem again upon us. 
What is this crazy thing in the bosom of 
humanity that awakens, now and then, to 
plunge the world into a cosmic nightmare .^^ 

Germany is the sick mind of Europe. 

The future historian will analyze the 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

modern abnormalities of Germany as our 
proud contemporaries have analyzed the 
strange and incredible socio-psychic phe- 
nomena of man's darkest past. The re- 
ligion of Krupp brings back the religion of 
Juggernaut. The doctrine of Pan-German- 
ism brings back the holy crusades and 
pilgrimages. The furor teutonicus of mili- 
tarism brings back Demonophobia, during 
whose reign on earth, of a century and a 
half, the collective craze was the fear of 
the devil and the finding of the devil in 
old women's breasts. It is such a phan- 
tasmata of infernal agency and infatuation 
that the world has seen today in the 
spectacle of imperial Germany in her acute 
attack of social paranoia persecutoria — 
starting forth to fight the foreign devils in 
the months of the Great Fear. 

The crazy self in normal man is receiving 
an inordinate amount of attention in the 
newer science of social-psychology. In 

CHI 3 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

fact, it is one of the ear-marks of the up-to- 
date scientific spirit to find a new term and 
meaning for this strange element in human 
nature that is responsible for man's col- 
lective mood, crimes and craze. 

Gustave Le Bon, the French writer, 
seems to have been father of this school of 
thought, with his epoch-making book on 
"The Psychology of Crowds," for since 
then, that which he analyzed as the Soul 
of the Crowd, has taken its place in science 
and literature. Mob-psychology, the herd- 
instinct, the Mystic in man, the Subcon- 
scious, the inscrutable inner forces of life, 
in various forms, arrest the interest of the 
thinkers and writers today. The Psycho- 
analysts are popularizing their revelations 
of the Unconscious in man; Bergson has 
made fashionable his theory of the elan 
vital that seems to destroy faith in intellect 
and culture as our guide in life; and the 

Double Consciousness of human beings 
1:1423 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

has ceased to be the mere jargon of parlor 
hypnotists. 

It is understood that man has a primary- 
self which belongs to his own personality 
and a secondary self that belongs to others, 
to collectivities and overlordships ; a sort 
of cosmic self. With the first he is an in- 
dividual, an integer, self-conscious, self- 
controUed, and capable of reason, criticism 
and judgment. With the second he is a 
negative self, a collective self, plasmic to 
all contagions, suggestions and controls. 
From these collective selves of men springs 
that kind of super-oneness and Will that 
rules the crowd, the mob, the great blind 
mass-movements of men. 

This collective soul is a crazy soul: for 
it is a fear-driven soul. Its roots clutch 
deep into the red vitals of the race. It 
was fear that made the animal collective. 
It is fear that huddles together the hoofed 
creatures of the forests or sets them on 

i:i43] 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

senseless stampedes across the open. Fear 
confuses the Hfe-urge. Man's proud up- 
building of society is thus filled with the 
black ether of fear, and in its very nature 
the collective atmosphere and magnetisms 
are those of craze. 

The craze of Germany has its genesis 
in her deliberate cultivation of the col- 
lective self in the nature of the Germans. 
This has been the one aim of State and 
Kultur the past forty odd years. The 
Franco-Prussian war gave the hysteria of 
success to the Germans, and in the fever 
of the parvenu for More, they began to 
plot and unite, like bloated thieves, and sur- 
prised among themselves the secret for a new 
civilization in Germany to be constructed 
upon a great new Ideal of Collectivity. 

At a time when the great Democracies 
were busy creating the atmosphere of 
freedom within which the human indi- 
viduality could develop, Germany became 
1:144] 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

busy with her vast machinery and meta- 
physics for the crushing of the individuaUty 
of the German. In the name of a new 
SociaHzation the German was influenced to 
surrender his right to think and to act for 
himself. He gave his soul into the keeping 
of the monarch behind the throne, and for 
this he was given a promise, sweet enough 
to tickle a God's ears, the promise of a 
tableland of a Germanized world. No 
over-victualled, over-vitalized German, of 
this period of war's lusty toasts, could say: 
**Get thee behind me, Satan" to such a 
prospective feast, and the great united 
goose-stepping of the nation in arms began. 
Around their round tables, the Germans 
became a nation of conspirators and doc- 
trinaires. They created the new morality, 
the Morality of War, the new idealism, the 
Glory of the Teuton, and the new religion, 
the Divine Mission of the Kaiser, for the 
German people. 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

The Germans became Germanized. 
Dosed, dizzied, intoxicated and empoisoned 
on the new draughts for conceit and cre- 
dulity, every German and near-German 
within the frontiers suddenly found him- 
self as a German. Until this crisis of 
change, the Germans had been a hetero- 
geneous folk, of many races, creeds and 
tribal gods. But this orientation and cul- 
ture made them homogeneous, politically 
and idealistically, finally to become so 
temperamentally and racially. "The men- 
tal unification of a race has never been 
carried to such an extent, " says Le Bon of 
the Germans. Professor Munsterberg fitly 
described his Fatherland when he declared: 
"The German nation has found itself again, 
and its Oneness of mind is symbolized in 
the Kaiser." Yes, the Kaiser has been 
but a symbol, a glittering breath-bating 
symbol of an Almighty German. 

From all this unitedness there came 
i:i46 3 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

strength. Germany was like a forcing-bed 
in a hot-house atmosphere fashioned to 
produce prodigies of growth, vitahty and 
Kultur, Iron and Blood, the poHcy of Force, 
the concepts of Colossi, the superlatives of 
living, — such sap to the life-urge made the 
Germans perform feats, at least of pro- 
ductivity. But if in union there is strength 
there is also weakness. As Ross remarks 
in his study of the collective craze, ''Ethnic 
and mental homogeneity are favorable to 
the craze;" and the results from Germany's 
oneness has proven the truth of this, and 
brought on her great fatality. 

Its evidence is found, too, in nations of 
contrary culture, such as is seen in our own 
Land of Liberty, as an extreme example. 
The wholesome history of America is broken 
up with records of the social dervishes and 
spasms of the collective psychosis, at times. 
The Great Religious Revivals, the Puritan 
persecutions, the Shakers, the Jerkers, the 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Millerites, the race-riots and lynching bees 
and long series of popular hysteria in 
Bubbles, Booms, Panics and Crusades 
against the devil in man or woman, is a 
sufficient testimony. 

But one can trace these outbreaks to 
morbid forms of social union that have 
appeared in certain centers of American 
civilization. In earlier days the American 
people were more homogeneous, in race, 
faith and motivation, than they are today, 
and these were the classic days of the 
crazy mass-movements. America's culture 
of humanism, cosmopolitanism, and far- 
flung gates of hospitality to the world of 
foreign devils and gods and men, has 
given her the prophylactic atmosphere in 
which she has preserved her health of 
national character, and clarity of national 
vision. She has localized and provincial- 
ized the disease that has corrupted the 

whole body|of Germany. 
CHS] 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

Germany has lost her health of mind 
and vision. The German has lost his 
sense of humor and cannot see himself as 
others see him; and he has lost his faculty 
for sympathy and cannot understand the 
point of view of any nation or person ex- 
cept the German. It is only humor and 
sympathy that keep one sane. The Ger- 
man possesses the monomaniacal diathesis, 
and his eyes are the blind, amaurotic eyes 
of the hysterical subject who sees only 
what he is told to see by his unseen con- 
troller. 

Yet there is a German genius. The 
German culture, the past three decades, 
brought this genius into its full flowering. 
A bloom brilliant as polished metal, and in 
the feats of the German heyday, it dazzled 
the world as the specialized genius of the 
German. It was the genius of the collective 
self — tendered and stimulated until it burst 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

like the century plant into a rare, abnormal, 
noisy, superbloom. 

It has become trite to say that the Ger- 
mans have invented nothing in science, 
and contributed nothing to art and lit- 
erature during the period of their so-called 
Prussianization. It is true they have in- 
vented and contributed nothing that re- 
quired the faculties of original inspiration, 
imagination and intuition; for their in- 
tellectuality required always an external 
directing. But the Germans have accom- 
plished marvels in making-over the crea- 
tions, following out the suggestions, and 
selecting the values from the science, art 
and literature of the world. Their busi- 
ness was to make-over the world; and 
they began by Germanizing the world's 
ideas and possessions. To Germanize a 
thing was to exaggerate, elaborate and 
overdo it. German genius could not origi- 
nate but it could amplify, fortify super-fy 
1:1503 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

everything made or remade by the Germans. 
Great Virtuosi of Matter, one might call 
them. 

The intellect alone cannot understand 
life. The intellectuality of the Germans 
has been a one-sided development whose 
obliquity of vision carried them afar from 
the path of true evolution, into misunder- 
standings of life, nature and the rest of 
mankind. 

But German genius furnished the world 
with its intellectual sensationalism, during 
the dynamic years that preceded the war. 
German science, art and literature became 
established businesses for fashion-making 
in Novelties of Idea, with which to catch 
a world's following. Nietzscheism, Bern- 
hardism, and innumerable other schools of 
queer-thinking Herr professors circulated 
a futurism in morals and manners that in- 
fected the lusty youth of the intellectual 
world. The foremost artists of Berlin and 

1:1513 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

Vienna started and spread the nouveau art 
business, mere craziness in paint; and the 
Teutonic ^'scientijBc investigators" set into 
motion the world's modern medical fads 
and cults, the craze for "experimental re- 
search," vivisection, organo-serumtherapy, 
etc. In all the departments of their 
far-exploited intellectuality, one can trace 
the taint of catchy oddity that emanated 
from the German's perversion. Although 
the German genius could out-herod Herod 
wherever it found its outlet as a collector, 
it is clear that the Germans have excelled 
and distinguished themselves only as col- 
laborators, compilers, researchers, erudites, 
adapters, transformers, in a kind of mass- 
movement of little busybodies in university, 
laboratory, atelier and factory. 

The collective genius is the genius for 
organizing, mechanizing, specializing, cen- 
tralizing. And under the focus of the 
Great German Genius, the Germans sought 
1:1523 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

to set the world ablaze. They were fast 
collecting the world with their Banks and 
Ballins, Spies and Trade, encircling and 
earth-worming the unsuspecting old globe, 
before the war. Henri Hauser, in his 
illuminating book on ** Germany's Com- 
mercial Grip on the World," tells the ro- 
mance of Germany's material success and 
emphasizes that '*the German has the 
temperament of the syndicalist." 

The German's machine-mind worked to 
the wing-beating of the great national 
spirit; hence his success of excess in in- 
dustry and commerce. But German genius 
fulfilled itself in more ethereal realms as 
well. The musical genius of the Germans, 
for instance, which one understands only 
with the enlightenment of Le Bon, who 
calls music *'The Art of the Crowd." 
Music is, in fact, the pure element of a 
cosmic collectivity, and its appeal is to the 
mystic wilds in the human soul. In ap- 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

plied chemistry, also, the German genius 
found its medium, and full expression, for 
the collective genius has an essential af- 
finity for gas, poisons and explosives. 

Militarism consummated the German 
genius. At last, upon the battle-field one 
sees the true aim and end of the German 
genius in those great mass-formations of 
little automatic men, blindly moving, 
blindly obeying and destroying, at the 
command of their Shadow Monarch, like 
creatures rapt in some hideous dream. 

"Make your mind a blank" is the first 
thing a hypnotizer says to his subject. 
"Make your mind a blank" has been said 
to the German people for forty-four years 
of preparation for the Triumph of No 
Man's Land. 

The Germans were perfected as instru- 
ments for the perpetration of frightfulness 
through their spirit of suggestibility. Long 

before its systematic cultivation by the 
1:1543 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

Imperial Government, the natural sug- 
gestibility of the German temperament was 
pointed out and generally commented upon. 
In the days of Goethe and Schiller the 
publication of Werther caused an epidemic 
of suicide among the German students, and 
Die Rauber inspired a large number of 
Germans to go and live in the forests. 
The sheep-like quality, the famed docility, 
of the Germans has led them to the sham- 
bles like devil-possessed sheep that one 
might read of in the Apocalypse, but not 
in this cold day of scientific reality and 
skepticism. 

The Germans, are not responsible for 
their crime and craze of war, for their 
infernal malice, atrocities and Lusitania- 
jubilees, any more than is the entranced 
subject of a hypnotizer, who knows not 
what he does. The Germans are but the 
subjects, the suggestible, collective, hypnoid 

selves of their uncanny overlordship. 

1:1553 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

The War Lord, like all the born leaders 
of mobs, crowds and infatuate hosts, has 
been a master in the arts of social hypnoti- 
zation. 

The state of hypnosis, the Psychiatrists 
tell us, is but the state of heightened, ab- 
normal suggestibility. The known con- 
ditions for achieving the state of hypnosis 
are: Fixation of attention. Limitation of 
voluntary movements. Limitation of the 
field of consciousness. Inhibition and Im- 
mediate execution. 

These conditions have been carried out, 
with characteristic German thoroughness, 
in the military training and thinking of 
the Germans, and their culminate effect 
has been that of a nation's hypnosis. 
The Kaiser, in his shining armor, has been 
a symbol that held an enthralled nation in 
a tension of expectancy for — The Day. 

Can a nation go insane.^ 

In Germany we can, at least, trace a 
C156 3 



THE GREAT FEAR IN GERMANY 

strange etiology that began with a nation's 
culture of the collective self in man and 
has ended in what the social-psychologists 
term, "the breakdown of equilibrium char- 
acteristic of the great collective psychosis." 

Nature, too, as well as nations, seems to 
have her strange periods ot folie circulaire, 
her recurrent madnesses, which make it seem 
as though it were some hidden law of being 
that anarchy should issue from Law, ex- 
plosion from concretion, death from excess 
of life. 

The months that were once called the 
months of the Great Fear seem to bring 
the days of the earth's secret rabies. They 
are the year's bloated days, nature's su- 
perlative days, when the fruits bleed, the 
moon gapes red, and the dog-star has its 
heliacal rising. Then the reptiles go blind 
from their poison, the beasts run mad with 
strange fear, and the nights become like 

Cimmerian nights; in which the stars, too, 

C157 3 



THE DRY ROT OF SOCIETY 

lose their balance, mock at heavenly order, 
turn into shooting stars and meteorological 
fireworks — until the sober telescope- 
gazers here below can see Life only as an 
epileptic fit between two Nothings. 



CISS] 



"THE CROWDS AND 
THE VE ILED W OMAN" 

"A remarkable exploit. The author has a fine lit- 
erary temperament, thoughts, emotions, a rich com- 
plex personality; her road will be an ascending one, 
leading to the summits of glory." — Max Nordau 

*' A remarkable book of strength and an allusiveness 
very rare in English fiction." — T. P's Weekly, London 

"Since Margaret Fuller we have had, in the realms 
of the transcendental, no American woman to equal 
Marian Cox in abundance of ideas and opulence of 
vocabulary. And she is far more poetical in expres- 
sion. 'The Crowds and the Veiled Woman' is an ex- 
traordinary volume, a book for the discerning. 

— Edwin Markham 

*'An amazing conception; an ideal vehicle for a 
searching criticism of the miasmatic beauties of a 
decadent idealism. . . . The book is a Gustav Dore 
in prose." — J. B. Kerfoot in Life 

"It is the most strikingly original and brilHantly 
written compromise between the essay and the novel 
since 'Mademoiselle de Maupin'. Its speculations are 
more profound. ... If Marian Cox is a woman, she is 
the equal of George Sand and George Eliot in at least 
her insight into the male mind." 

— G. F. Douglas in the San Francisco Chronicle 

"The startling originality must be recognised by 
every reader endowed with sympathy or imagination. 
It is an amazing work. The book reminds us in some 
places of 'Dorian Gray.' But it has a share of 
Hawthorne's symbolism and of Poe's vividness." 

— Rochester Post Express 



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